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

Groups > linux.debian.user > #180608 > unrolled thread

Boot Drives for older Systems

Back to article view | Back to linux.debian.user

Contents

  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

#180608 — Boot Drives for older Systems

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?

	This sounds like and probably is a stupid question since
I presently do this very thing but the boot drive is /dev/sda1
and the big drive is /dev/sdb1 which has about 300 GB on it and
runs off the secondary slot on the same controller with no
known issues.

	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.

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.

[toc] | [next] | [standalone]

#180609

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-

[toc] | [prev] | [next] | [standalone]

#180614

Le 02/05/2017 à 19:13, Martin McCormick a écrit :
> 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?

If I remember correctly, some old BIOS completely hang when detecting a 
drive bigger than 32 GiB. So such a disk cannot be used for booting with 
such a BIOS, unless it has a 32-GiB clip jumper or its HPA (host 
protected area) is set to less than 32 GiB.

[toc] | [prev] | [standalone]

Back to top | Article view | linux.debian.user

csiph-web