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After having trouble with booting Linux after installing Windows 7 on a separate SSD, I am just wondering, what is the benefit of creating a separate /boot partition during installation?

I remember reading about it years ago when I first started trying out Linux. It seemed to be a best practices procedure for installation. But, after having trouble booting just now and wondering what the difference is between the files in the /boot partition vs. the files in the /boot directory in root, I'm just wondering why there seems to be two copies.

linstar
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  • Actually psusi answered my question. The other post is very informative, but, it doesn't mention that /boot in root is just the mount of the /boot partition. – linstar Jul 14 '15 at 01:27

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The /boot directory in the root is simply the place where your boot partition gets mounted, which means the files in that partition appear in /boot. These days about the only reason to have a /boot partition is if you want to encrypt your root partition. In the late '90s it was often needed to work around BIOS limitations on hard disk size: the BIOS could not boot the system from beyond a certain point on the disk, so all of the boot files had to be in the lower area of the disk.

psusi
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