Re: What's the deal with bootstrap (can't find YDL to boot now)?


Subject: Re: What's the deal with bootstrap (can't find YDL to boot now)?
From: Timothy A. Seufert (tas@mindspring.com)
Date: Wed Nov 07 2001 - 15:37:02 MST


At 1:30 PM -0700 11/7/01, Marc Stergionis wrote:
>OH, yeah ... and referring to Bo's earlier note, I *was* getting errors on
>two of my swap partitions, /hda16 & /hda17
>
>I was able to mkswap /dev/hda16 and alleviate *that* part on the next boot.
>
>But attempting
>
>mkswap /dev/hda17
>
>got: "No such file or directory"
>
>and at YDL bootup, the system check says when activating swap:
>
>cannot stat /dev/hda17 No such file or directory.

There is no /dev entry for hda17, that's why you get the error. By
default block devices are limited to device node entries for the
whole disk (e.g. /dev/hda) and 15 partitions.

For IDE devices there is space in the major/minor device number
allocation for up to 63 partitions, so you can try creating a device
node for hda17. /dev/hda16 is major 3 minor 16, so as root, execute
the following command:

mknod /dev/hda17 b 3 17

and for #18:

mknod /dev/hda18 b 3 18

so on and so forth, up to a maximum of 63.

If you're using SCSI drives you can only get 15 partitions per
device, because they had to pack the available major/minor address
space tighter to allow a lot more devices. That's probably why there
are only 15 partition device nodes created for IDE devices in default
installs -- it discourages people from using too many partitions even
on IDE.

Which brings up a question: is there a reason why you want to have
two or more swap partitions on the same disk? It doesn't seem likely
to gain you anything over having a single large swap partition.

-- 
Tim Seufert



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