43p-140 install issues

[Hollis Blanchard]

On Jan 5, 2005, at 5:47 AM, Sven Luther wrote:

> On Wed, Jan 05, 2005 at 10:49:19AM +0100, Philippe Guyot wrote:
>>> BTW, i have another question. I am trying to fix debian-installer to 
>>> create
>>> the prep partition, but i would like to have some info on the 
>>> expected
>>> constraints of said partition. Some tell it has to be entirely in 
>>> the first
>>> 8MB, others the first 5MB, and my powerstack has a 17MB boot 
>>> partition
>>> right now.
>>
>> All I can say, it's that my boot PReP partition is the 1st and about 
>> 4 MB in
>> size (cannot size it less than 1% of the disk.....)
>> second partition is /
>> third is swap.
>
> BTW, for debian, it makes more sense to have the second partition as 
> swap, and
> the third as /, i think, since it was decided some time back to 
> default to
> root=/dev/sda3, and not sda2.
>
>> That works for me.
>
> Until the kernel grows beyond 4MB.

The size of that partition depends on firmware limitations. I have 
definitely seen reports of systems not booting when the PReP boot 
partition was too large. I think on some systems that has even happened 
at 8MB.

In other words, should you need more space than 4-5MB at some point in 
the future, you cannot simply make a bigger boot partition.

-Hollis