swap at beginning of slice - danger?

[Oliver Fromme]

Gunther Nikl <gni at gecko.de> wrote:
 > Oliver Fromme wrote:
 > > By the way, the first partition on a disk is usually the root partition,
 > > not the swap partition.  So the problem could arise only in unusual
 > > circumstances.
 > 
 > IMHO this is a very dangerous assumption

It's not an assumption.  It's the layout that most people
use.  It's also the sysinstall default, first because of
historical reasons, and second because some BIOSes can't
boot if the root partition is too far from the start, so
it's best to put it at the very front of the disk.

Of course there are people who don't adhere to the default
settings, for whatever reason.  But those should know what
they're doing.  As I said, both swap and UFS skip the
first sectors, so there is no danger.

If you put other things on your partitions (e.g. a FAT FS)
which _do_ use the first sectors, then you should make
sure that your partition doesn't start on sector 0 of the
disk.  Otherwise you will notice very quickly.  :-)

Anyway, that was always the case, and people never had any
problems with it.  At least I can't remember any complaints
about it in the past few years.

Best regards
   Oliver

-- 
Oliver Fromme,  secnetix GmbH & Co. KG, Marktplatz 29, 85567 Grafing
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