[clue-tech] Partition madness

[Jim Ockers]

Hi Angelo,

> Great!  That's the missing piece that I didn't understand:  "grub tells
> the kernel that root is *HERE*"  You know I always wondered how that
> worked since fstab happens to be on the partition that hasn't been
> mounted  yet.

I think most bootloaders specify the root device on the kernel command
line.  cat /proc/cmdline to see what your kernel was booted with.

You can also use the rdev utility to tell the kernel what it's root
device is, i.e. rdev /boot/vmlinuz /dev/sda3

If you wrote /boot/vmlinuz to a floppy disk to make a boot floppy then
you could "rdev /dev/fd0 /dev/sda3" .

> On a side note, is it still a good idea to have a boot partition at the
> beginning fo the disk?

Depends how old your BIOS is, most new BIOSes can probably map huge
disks and therefore boot a bootloader or kernel no matter where it is 
on the disk.

-- 
Jim Ockers, P.Eng. (ockers at ockers.net)
Contact info: please see http://www.ockers.net/
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