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Is a /boot partition necessary anymore?
Well, the question title says it all. Are there any benefits of creating a separate directory for /boot. Is there any kind of grub/any-other-bootloader crash that can corrupt the partition it is installed on? or any dual-boot scenarios where having separate /boot partition can save me?
Exactly what you said. For example, i once had (am talking about 9.04 or 9.10 here) a problem where the root partition got all weird on me. Since i had the boot partition in the same place as everything else i could not boot and try to fix anything. After that i learned that i should have the boot part separate from the rest since in some extreme cases if something goes bad, it will go bad only the specific partition. I also recommend to have not only the partition of boot separate from others but the home also separate so in the event of updating or reinstalling you do not need to do a backup for all your things.
It also helps to have the boot part in another partition since if it happens to malfunction you know you have everything in another partition safe from harm.
This has changed alot in the last few years with the way Ubuntu has evolved as an operating system. The following link on Jorge Castro's blog pretty much sums it up as not required from the people that bring us Ubuntu.....
If your root partition is on LVM, software RAID, of XFS filesystem- separate /boot is mandatory. Otherwise it is not necessary, but it is good practice to have separate /boot.