Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!samsung!think!yale!cmcl2!lori!jan!edler
From: edler@jan.ultra.nyu.edu (Jan Edler)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc.rt
Subject: Re: Non-standard partition sizes, files lost
Summary: forget the spare root
Message-ID: <2098@lori.ultra.nyu.edu>
Date: 22 Mar 90 14:46:30 GMT
References: <8603@lindy.Stanford.EDU>
Sender: news@lori.ultra.nyu.edu
Organization: New York University, Ultracomputer project
Lines: 34

In article <8603@lindy.Stanford.EDU> CN.RNA@forsythe.stanford.edu
(Richard Anderson) writes of problems with a 2-drive system in which he
has a spare copy of the root partition on the second drive, and has
trouble because his second drive doesn't also have a swap partition the
same size as that on the first drive.

Here at NYU we've never felt the need to keep a spare root partition on
the second (or third) drive of a machine.  There are several reasons
for this:
1) A machine with only 70MB drives doesn't really have a lot of space
   to waste,
2) We have a bunch of RTs, so our resources available to help a suffering
   machine are generally adequate.  E.g. we don't even backup our
   root and /usr partitions, since all the machines have essentially
   the same stuff on them; the rest can be re-created if necessary.
3) We use the miniroot diskette when we can't use the regular root
   partition.  Often, we modify a copy of the ibm-supplied miniroot,
   to get it to do what we want.  E.g. it is easy to make a miniroot
   that can be used for rrestore.
4) Our experience with disk reliability has been very good.
   In particular, the only times we've had to rely on 2) or 3)
   are when doing things like repartitioning a drive, setting
   up a new machine, or upgrading to a new release of the system.

You could probably figure out why your system had trouble with the
configuration you were attempting, but I'd recommend you just take
dumps of your root partition every so often, and restore from it if
you ever need to.  It really is much simpler, and you'll hardly
ever have to do it.  You can certainly partition the second drive
any way you want to.

Jan Edler
NYU Ultracomputer Research Laboratory
edler@nyu.edu