Manual Fix 4892

On Wednesday 28 September 2005 20:01, Edward S. Baiz Jr. stood up and spoke the following words to the mbuttes incomp.os.linux.misc...:

What you need on boot-up is most likely everything that sits in your root filesystem, if you have been wise enough to split off all directories that can be split off from the root filesystem, i.e. in alphabetical order...: -boot -home -opt -tmp -usr -var

Eventually you can split off *-root* as well. It is only there to contain the root user's own files, which should in fact only be configuration files and aBashhistory.

Your root filesystem - which is not the same thing as your root directory, - should *only* contain the contents of the following directories...: -bin -dev (note: this is irrelevant if you're usingudevordevfs-) -etc -sbin -initrd (note: this is irrelevant if you're not using aninitrd-)

The directories *-proc* and *-sys* are virtual filesystems, i.e. their contents are not on the on-disk root filesystem. If you're runningudevor the olderdevfs,the same is true for *-dev.*

From the directories you split off, you should for safety's sake also mount the following asread-only:-boot -opt -usr

Any maintenance can always be done by temporarily remounting those asread-write.

In the above scenario, with all shareable and non-shareable, static and non-static data neatly separated, it's a piece of cake to back up your root filesystem and only have a copy of what's really needed.

The directories *-bin,* *-etc* and *-sbin* are needed upon boot (and in single-user maintenance mode), plus your kernel image of course, but this is only during thereal-modephase of the bootstrap, when the bootloader needs to load your kernel (and eventually yourinitrd-) into memory. Once the kernel is in memory, *-boot* is no longer needed.

Hope this was helpful enough... ;-)

-- With kind regards,

*Aragorn* (Registered Gnu-Linux user #223157)