Should root partition be first partition?

[Garance A Drosihn]

At 8:09 AM -0600 2/8/10, Peter Steele wrote:
>I've set up a system with gpart and have the swap partition first 
>followed by root, var, and so on. This works fine but I've seen 
>documents that always have root first, then swap. Is there any 
>reason that root should be the first partition or can it follow swap 
>space?

In the world of MBR partitioning, there is some situation where it's
important that the root partition be 'a'.  Unfortunately, I don't
remember what it was.  Probably something having to do with the boot
loader.  I do remember running into it once when I had the root
partition as 'd' by mistake.  But that was several years ago, so
I don't remember the details.

In any case, I would not expect the same problems to come up once
you're using gpart partitioning.

-- 
Garance Alistair Drosehn            =   gad at gilead.netel.rpi.edu
Senior Systems Programmer           or  gad at freebsd.org
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute    or  drosih at rpi.edu