ext2->ext3

[Bill Campbell]

On Mon, Dec 23, 2002 at 12:04:31PM -0500, Matthew Carpenter wrote:

>How many stock bootloaders like XFS these days?  That's been one of the
>bigger problems with switching filesystems in the past.  I'd have to have
>an older boot partition and store data on the new FS...  Which still causes
>problems since the system and config is not on the super-duper filesystem.

>And I'm sorry, but I am still of the opinion that for my purposes I am
>better off using as much distro-stock as possible.

We normally set up a separate 100MB ext2 file system for /boot that's
shared by grub between multple bootable installed systems.  We started
doing this as a way to insure that /boot was below the 1024 sector limit,
and it's proven to have other advantages as well.  I know 100MB is far more
than is necessary, but then who would need more than 64k of RAM in a
computer?

   + The /boot partion can be normally mounted read-only, minimizing the
     possiblities of accidental damage.

   + It doesn't take long to run fsck on the /boot partition, which is rare
     in any case as it's usually mounted read-only.

   + If I'm testing a new install and don't tell it about the /boot
     partition, it can't clobber the working setup.  A bit of minor editing
     of /etc/fstab and the real /boot/grub/menu.lst makes the new system
     available.

   + It's very easy to backup and restore the boot info if necessary.

   + It's not important what type of file system the booted system's using
     so long as the booted kernel understands it.

Bill
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