On Sun, 2005-15-05 at 12:52 -0700, Kevin Brown wrote:
> > If I remember correctly, Gentoo doesn't automatically mount the /boot
> > so if the system crashes, the /boot partition is left alone, no need
> > for a mirroring system.  At one point you couldn't boot from anything
> > but ext2, but I think that is long gone.
> 
> I think the issue of booting from non-ext2 partitions was that the 
> modules for those have to be compiled into the kernel or need an initrd 
> to be able to read them.  This isn't a distro specific problem.
> 
> > One thing I want to play with is LVM.  I had set up my video server
> > and didn't do LVM.  Now I added a drive and had to change the setup
> > slightly.  With the LVM, I could have added the drive and extended
> > the video partition to include it.
> > 
> > Oh well, next time I upgrade that box.
> 
> Sounds interesting.

LVM is a really exceptional thing if you don't want to deal with RAID's
idiosyncrasies and simply combine drives into one or more partitions.
Just remember - if a drive dies, you've lost any data that happened to
be stored on that drive. You can also move all the data off of a drive
onto the others if there's enough room and remove/replace a drive "hot"
too (given your system and kernel support IDE hot-plugging) just like
RAID. My only grip with LVM is a partition size limit of 255Gb, but I
last tried pre-LVM2 so maybe that's been fixed and I can finally have a
full .5Tb home.

-Bryce