Date: 16 Oct 2002 12:43:29 -0700 From: swear@attbi.com (Gary W. Swearingen) To: Jerry McAllister <jerrymc@clunix.cl.msu.edu> Cc: jmd17@columbia.edu, freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: using an extended partition for freebsd Message-ID: <oiwuoi5fvi.uoi@localhost.localdomain> In-Reply-To: <200210161434.g9GEYJe19859@clunix.cl.msu.edu> References: <200210161434.g9GEYJe19859@clunix.cl.msu.edu>
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> > I am installing 4.7-REL on a PC with one PRIMARY and one EXTENDED partition.
> > The PRIMARY
> > partition is FAT and I have W98 there. I want to use the EXTENED partition
> > (the WHOLE partition -
> > there is currently nothing there) for FreeBSD but I read that FreeBSD needs
> > to be installed into
> > a PRIMARY partition.
Under the IBM disk-layout scheme we're still using 20 years later, you
may have up to 4 primary partitions. Most software supports having one
of them being an extended partition which contains secondary partitions.
So you have two primaries, one of them extended. (I suspect that one
could manage to use multiple extended partitions with Linux, with some
rarely-used "fdisk" features, but probably causing problems for some
software.)
> Right. An extended partition is something MS came up with to get around
> some historical narrow thinking. FreeBSD doesn't need that.
Be careful there. The BSD OSes essentially do the same thing, except
they allow four "extended" partitions and use different internal formats
and names:
primary partition -> slice
secondary partition -> partition
I think we should use the IBM jargon. While the slice/partition jargon
is a bit cleaner, the benefit is not worth the costs in continually
needing to explain the differences in documents and support forums,
and giving newbies another reason to return to what they know best.
> It just needs slices (which are called partitions by Microsloth).
Actually, it doesn't. FreeBSD can just have what it calls "partitions",
in which case there won't be a "partition table". But "they" recommend
having one slice anyway; I guess to support software (eg, on a Linux
disk) thatexpects the more common disk layout.
> > SYSINSTALL's FDISK program has an option ("Change Type") that lets me change
> > the EXTENDED
> > partition to FreeBSD, but I don't know if it is changing the partition to
> > PRIMARY or just making a
> > cosmetic Label change. And if it is making the change, will the BIOS
> > recognize it (will anything
> > break)
I've never used it but it sounds like it would work OK. The BIOS
doesn't need to recognize it, though with some boot loaders, it might
need to have the "/" secondary partition in the first 1024 cylinders for
your BIOS to grab all of the boot code.
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