Re: best use of 4Gb SSD in dual-boot machine?

On Mon, 10 Jan 2011 08:49:48 -0800 (PST), jkn <jkn_gg@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:

Thanks for all of that - very useful. I will probably go this route,
and maybe think about migrating to LVM at some point, which would
probably make some of this a bit eaiser/neater.

Mmmmaybe. LVM is rather more complex than simple partitioning, but a
necessary complexity if you're working with raid or other complex
schemes. I don't think it would help with this much.

I haven't recently checked where during the initialisation process /
etc/fstab will be read and the disks mounted/links made - presumably
early enough that if I follow your suggestion above, /var -> /mount/
spinningdisk/usr et. al. will be present when required?

As long as /boot /etc /sbin (maybe /bin too) are all on the ssd, you
should be good - the rest shouldn't be needed until after the other
stuff is mounted.

I can't remember how logging in /var is handled when /var isn't on the
boot partition, so you should probably investigate that first!

(if you didn't know, mounting a partition onto an already full
directory doesn't damage the content of that directory any more - but
it does hide it until you unmount. So the boot process might write
logs into /var on the SSD, and when you map a real /var partition on
top your boot logs will suddenly vanish or maybe top-truncated,
missing the early entries)

The fun thing about doing it the links way is that you don't need to
mess with the content of the spinning disk at all to do it. Set up the
SSD by copying the right stuff to it, make the changes in the
ssd:/etc/fstab, then set GRUB up on it. When all is ready, set the
BIOS to boot from it and give it a go.

If it doesn't work right, just point the BIOS back at the spinning
disk for booting, you're back in your usual environment and can carry
on trying.

Cheers - Jaimie
--
I was most impressed when I looked up into the London sky and saw
a star through all the light pollution. A few of us checked some
astronomy references to try and identify it, and we're reasonably
confident that it was Sol. -- Peter Corlett, asr
.

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