Re: cloning hard disk

From: Pigeon (jah.pigeon_at_ukonline.co.uk)
Date: 02/19/05

  • Next message: Ron Johnson: "Re: problem with font and sound" 
    Date: Fri, 18 Feb 2005 23:19:47 +0000
To: debian-user@lists.debian.org

    On Thu, Feb 17, 2005 at 02:50:54PM -0700, Allasso Travesser wrote:
    > On Monday 14 February 2005 11:54 am, you wrote:
    > > BTW your partitioning scheme could do with a little modification -
    > > it's customary to make the swap partition the first partition on the
    > > disk, not the last, as access to the outer part of a disk is faster.
    >
    > My understanding has been that the first partition has to be the boot
    > partition. Am I understanding you correctly, that you are saying that
    > hdx1 would be the swap partition?

    Yes, I've got several machines where [hs]dx1 is swap. Most of them
    don't have a separate /boot, but / is on [hs]dx2. I also have a
    machine with /boot on hda3.

    The "boot partition has to be first" thing is pretty well irrelevant
    these days. It used to be the case that a lot of BIOSes wouldn't
    recognise any of a hard disk beyond cylinder 1024, so you made /boot
    the first partition to keep it all below cylinder 1024. Any BIOS
    dating from later than the days when half a gig was a big, big drive
    won't have this problem.

    The other place it crops up is with systems that dual-boot Linux and
    Windoze. While it is possible to make Windoze run off other than the
    first partition if you hit it with a big enough hammer, it tends to be
    flaky and strange things happen. So with a dual-boot system you make
    the Windoze boot partition the first one.

    Having said that, /boot only needs to be say 50 MB, so if you do want
    to put it first it's so small it won't make a noticeable difference to
    swap speed. 

    -- 
Pigeon
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