On 12/5/2009 4:35 AM, Duncan wrote:
So FWIW, your "small" 8 gig partition for boot-time compatibility purposes is sort of already built into the GPT/EFI spec. That would contain all you needed to boot the kernel, and if you chose not to build them into your kernels, your ntfs and other kernel modules would be loaded from /boot as standard initramfs/initrd, if necessary, or from the standard/lib/modules/<kern-ver> subdir, if not necessary to load /.
Booting was one of my least concern (it's a portable external harddisk, I don't need an OS in there), I use the FAT partition to store NTFS drivers (source and precompiled) for systems that don't already have NTFS-3G installed and where internet is scarce or compiler is unavailable (e.g. Gentoo LiveCD or Macs) since the rest of my external harddisk is formatted as NTFS.
These systems are often not my own (a friend's Macbook) or is volatile (e.g. Gentoo LiveCD, which can only read NTFS). The 8G is small compared to the external's size (120G), but big enough to transfer a single-layer-DVD worth of data if I need to (once I salvaged data from a broken Windows NTFS filesystem with Gentoo LiveCD to the FAT partition).
