Partition Scheme

[R. Hirschfeld]

Tim,

> From: "Timothy R. Butler" <tbutler@uninetsolutions.com>
> Date: Thu, 23 Oct 2003 21:30:55 -0400
> 
> I was just wondering, does LinuxPPC need a boot partition? Does it need
> a boot partition for each distribution installed (i.e. different
> versions of YDL and/or another distro installed side-by-side YDL)?
> 
> In particular would a scheme like this work?
> 
> - 1 MB - /boot YDL boot partition
> - 60 GB - OS X Partition
> - 512 MB - Swap
> - 80 GB - YDL Root
> - 19 GB - Distro2 Root
> 
> Or would some other accommodations be needed to make Distro2 run?

You'll likely get responses from others more knowledgeable, but
perhaps you'll find this helpful.

I believe that a boot partition is needed if you boot via yaboot.  I
have an Old World machine and so don't do that, and I don't have a
boot partition.  Instead I boot via MacOS and have the extension BootX
installed there, which early in the boot process asks whether to
continue booting MacOS or switch to Linux.

I do have two separate Linux distros installed.  Below is the
partition map (output from pdisk -l) of my (small) disk.  The tiny
partitions at the beginning (1-6) are created by the Apple formatter.
7 is my main MacOS partition (hfs+) and 8 is an hfs partition shared
between MacOS and Linux (no longer needed with hfs+ support in the
kernel).  9 is swap space shared by both distros, 10 is Gentoo root,
11 is YDL root, 12 is /home mounted by both YDL and Gentoo, and the
800K left over in 13 is just big enough for a boot partition should I
ever need one (it would be a bit odd to have it at the end of the
disk, but I don't think it matters if the earlier partitions aren't
bootable).  This configuration works fine for me; the only slight
nuisance is that BootX is not really designed with multiple distros in
mind and you can't just click on a button to choose.  I have it set to
boot YDL by default and when I want to boot Gentoo I have to edit
/dev/hda11 to /dev/hda10 by hand when it stops to ask during the boot
and select a different kernel from a drop-down menu (with BootX, the
Linux kernel is loaded from the MacOS System Folder).

Ray

Partition map (with 512 byte blocks) on '/dev/hda'
 #:                type name              length   base     ( size )
 1: Apple_partition_map Apple                 63 @ 1       
 2:      Apple_Driver43*Macintosh             54 @ 64      
 3:      Apple_Driver43*Macintosh             74 @ 118     
 4:    Apple_Driver_ATA*Macintosh             54 @ 192     
 5:    Apple_Driver_ATA*Macintosh             74 @ 246     
 6:       Apple_Patches Patch Partition      512 @ 320     
 7:           Apple_HFS "MacOS"         12582912 @ 832      (  6.0G)
 8:           Apple_HFS "Ray"            4194304 @ 12583744 (  2.0G)
 9:     Apple_UNIX_SVR2 swap              524288 @ 16778048 (256.0M)
10:     Apple_UNIX_SVR2 untitled         8785920 @ 17302336 (  4.2G)
11:     Apple_UNIX_SVR2 untitled         8785920 @ 26088256 (  4.2G)
12:     Apple_UNIX_SVR2 untitled         4194304 @ 34874176 (  2.0G)
13:          Apple_Free Extra               1600 @ 39068480

Device block size=512, Number of Blocks=39070080 (18.6G)
DeviceType=0x0, DeviceId=0x0
Drivers-
1:  22 @ 64, type=0x1
2:  36 @ 118, type=0xffff
3:  20 @ 192, type=0x701
4:  33 @ 246, type=0xf8ff