[TriLUG] partitioning: primary or logical

[Jeremy P]

On Wed, 15 May 2002, Henryk M. Kowalski wrote:

> Ah, yes; but _why_ doesn't it matter?  Is it because they don't
> physically have to live on a HD at all?  Can they be network shares (NFS
> or Samba), for instance?  Now that you've piqued our curiosity, can you
> elaborate?  

Sure.  I've set up diskless workstations -- boxes with no hard drives at
all, where every partition, including swap, was NFS mounted.  (If you get
a "boot" PROM for your NIC, you can boot off the network too.)  Although
in my case the workstation was running NetBSD, it can be done with Linux
as well.  Do a google search for the diskless workstation HOWTO.

The only restriction is that the /boot partition, if you're booting off
the hard drive, be within the first 1024 cylinders.  (This is the whole
reason for creating a boot aprtition, instead of just having the kernel
boot off /).  I'm not sure that modern BIOSes even have this restriction
however.

-Jeremy