Whats up with /boot?

Recently I tried to install an old Redhat distro that I got from a book for my class; I used a Virtual Box to install it, gave it 2 GBs of disc space (it was a old version 2002), let it do the auto partition an then I did the usual install. The auto partition gave /boot 50 MBs of space, swap about 500 and the rest went to /. A minute or two into the installion it gave me an error that it ran out of space. From what I can tell, it was installing everything into /boot, what the heck is with that? It was supposed to just put the mount point into that. From what I could tell there wasn't any thing I should of changed to not make that happen.

Now comes to my gripe, what is up with some distros doing that? I've also had this same exact thing happen when I tried to install Gentoo. Why do they recommend 50 MBs when the installer tries to install too much under /boot?

 

uuhh

why use a 2002 distro and not a recent one??????

 

Wow......
Just use recent distro, like Fedora or Ubuntu.

 

I installed it on a vm for a reason because its old

Theres some files in the old distro that they don't make on newer distros and the book uses them for examples.

Now talk about why they try to install too much in /boot? It happened when I installed Gentoo and they recommended doing it. Just ended up messing up the install. The Gentoo version was new btw.

 

I've installed Gentoo a few times over the past few years, and always allot 35-50MB to the boot partition. Not sure what's causing it to trip up on your system.

 

What do you mean? Was the installater putting everything in the /boot directory? As far as I know, the /boot directory contains the system.map file as well as the kernel, which takes about 30MB of space.

 

I'm not sure either, maybe its a setting I hit while installing. They would tell me that the /boot was just for the kernel and whatnot but every time I would get to the actual install it would fill up and stop the install. Happened in both Gentoo and now this older Redhat edition.

Not sure why its doing it, I'll stick with the 2 partition scheme for now until I figure it out.

 

If you're running it as a VM, create a dynamic virtual filesystem so that the filesystem will grow according to Red Hat's needs. VirtualBox has this feature.

 

I did set it to that, for some reason it didn't work. Maybe the fixed Linux partitions stopped it from expanding.

 

Since I'm finally at a loss, I'm juts going to blame you.

Can you set the drive to a fixed size if 10GB? That has to be enough.

 

Since I'm finally at a loss, I'm just going to blame you.

Can you set the drive to a fixed size if 10GB? That has to be enough.

 

The only thing I can think of which would cause this is if by mistake you tell the installer that the partition which is going to be mounted as /boot in the final system should be used as /.

According to your account that's not what happened but I have no alternate explanation. I've never seen any installer treat /boot as / unless the user messed up.

 

I don't even use a /boot. Faaget about it ! :=)

 

One day when I get some extra time on my hands I'll make a vm of gentoo using virtual box and I'll try to figure how it happens. I kinda wish the amd64 bit version would work under virtual box though.

I did end up getting that old redhat distro up and running but I ended up giving it more space then I want to give it.

 

you probs dont have your mount points set correctly, or didnt pay attention when it asked which mountpoint to install X on

you should have

/boot (for the boot files like grub, etc) (this partition is not even necessary)

/ (for the root and system partition)

swap (for swap)

anything else you might have added