[Gllug] Fdisk in a pure Linux environment

[David L Neil]

Is it necessary to partition a new HDD to have any primary partitions at 
all?
Is it necessary that the partition mounted as /boot (or any partition) 
be starred as Boot-able?


I am adding a new HDD to an existing CentOS 5 m/c.

The machine is:
- basically a app/web.test and SOHO ops server
   (but sometimes use its Gnome for web.dev work)
- is purely Linux/will never run Windows*
- is AMD 64-bit
- does not have a virtualisation-capable CPU
- oldish K8N motherboard/chip-set
- 2 SATA drives (including this new one), 2 PATA drives, 2 CD/DVD 
drives, and a legacy diskette drive
- existing SATA and one PATA drive are largely LVM-ed, the other PATA is 
mounted at its own mount point and is exclusively data, eg Subversion

The new Seagate Barracuda drive is somewhat faster than the older, 
smaller Barracuda. Over the festive period I plan to (clean) install 
CentOS 6 on the new HD and migrate the confs, etc. (cf doing an 
'upgrade'). This will also entail moving from GRUB '1' to GRUB 2. (Am 
also pondering a move from Gnome to XFCE but that's likely irrelevant)

Meantime as soon as I can physically install the HDD I'd like to employ 
some of the disk space for data or work-space during the 
archiving/spring-cleaning process preparatory to the migration/upgrade...

I am thinking of partitioning the new drive:
- 100MB ext2 for /boot
- 2GB for /swap (theory saying <= RAM size)
- rest as ~100GB partitions which would be LVM-ed for both system and 
data mount points, as needed, and over time.

Reading some recent material indicates that my knowledge/memory and 
history are being surpassed (although I'm not talking about UEFI). So 
I'm pondering the following questions:

Isn't the "Boot" star (as reported in Fdisk) now only a hang-over from 
MS-Windows, in fact MS-DOS, and thus irrelevant to a pure-Linux machine?

So can it be ignored totally, relying upon setting boot-drive priorities 
in the BIOS?

Can the entire drive be partitioned as a single Extended partition (no 
Primary partition at all) and that sub-divided into Logical partitions 
from there?

When the time comes (and all else being equal!), will CentOS 6 boot 
happily (under BIOS direction) from such a HD set-up?


[no I haven't physically installed the drive to be able to experiment 
for myself. The m/c is currently in almost constant (and unpredictable) 
use with projects using it as staging server, testing and gaining 
(remote) client approval... which won't fall-off for a few more weeks...]

* from which description I conveniently exclude non-CIFS formatted 
partitions containing directories shared by Samba to MS-Win clients.

-- 
Regards,
=dn
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