Groups | Search | Server Info | Keyboard shortcuts | Login | Register [http] [https] [nntp] [nntps]

Groups > linux.debian.user > #180609

Re: Boot Drives for older Systems

Show all headers | View raw

On Tue, May 02, 2017 at 12:13:37PM -0500, Martin McCormick wrote:
> This drive will be booting Debian so my question is not totally
> off-topic. Some older P.C. BIOS programs will not boot any drive
> over 32GB. Can you get a larger drive, partition it with a 32 GB
> boot partition and expect it to work that way with the remainder
> of the drive available for more space such as /home?

Usually yes. The exception is that some BIOSes have problems
even recognizing the existence of a disk larger than X TB, where
X=2 or 3.

> 	Maybe a better form of this question is- Are there any
> unexpected gotchas likely in using SDA1 for the boot drive and
> SDA2-x  for the rest? It will probably be SDA2 for most of the
> rest with SDA3 being extended and SDA5 swap.

No, this is perfectly normal.

> My 300 GB drive still works but it is around 8 years old and is a
> spinning  electro mechanical type and it will fail some day about
> a millisecond after it was working perfectly.

That is the way these things go.

General reminders that you probably don't need, but someone will: 

RAID is for uptime, backups are for recovery.

If you don't have an automatic backup, you probably don't have 
a current backup.

If you don't store your backup in a format that you can read
without special hardware or software, you probably won't have
that hardware or software when you need it the most.

-dsr-

Back to linux.debian.user | Previous | Next — Previous in thread | Next in thread | Find similar | Unroll thread

Thread

Boot Drives for older Systems "Martin McCormick" <martin.m@suddenlink.net> - 2017-05-02 19:20 +0200
  Re: Boot Drives for older Systems Dan Ritter <dsr@randomstring.org> - 2017-05-02 19:30 +0200
  Re: Boot Drives for older Systems Pascal Hambourg <pascal@plouf.fr.eu.org> - 2017-05-02 20:50 +0200

csiph-web