On Jul 5, 19:46, Pete Turnbull wrote: It was once common practice to keep /usr on a separate partition, particularly if you had small (200MB) drives, in which case most of the root drive would be root and swap, with /usr mounted later. If you want to prevent a user filling his space so that there's no room left in /tmp or /var/tmp either, it might still be a good idea but otherwise multiple partitions usually just mean that at some future date there's enough space on the physical drive for <what_you_want>, except it's split betwwen several partitions and therefore unusable[1] :-) I think I've just found the one I booted it off. It's an EFS CD I burned a long time ago; if you're still stuck I can upload the 28MB volume header tomorrow[2] and you can burn that onto a CD-R. You can boot a CD that only has a vh. I discovered that the first time I burned an EFS CD, which is normally built in two files -- the volume header (which includes the sgilabel, partition table, and things in mr or sa), and "the rest". Unfortunately instead of cat'ing the two files to cdrecord, I told cdrecord to write the two files on its command line, and ended up with two data tracks instead of one. [1] As I discovered last time I built a complete inst-able perl under IRIX 5.3. [2] 28MB is a bit much for my ISDN line this evening. -- Pete Peter Turnbull Network Manager University of York