From owner-freebsd-newbies Thu Oct 4 2:16:53 2001 Delivered-To: freebsd-newbies@freebsd.org Received: from alaska.net (kitsune.nwc.alaska.net [209.112.130.10]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 7046B37B406 for ; Thu, 4 Oct 2001 02:16:49 -0700 (PDT) Received: from Hobbes.sodorline.home (102-pm4.jdc.alaska.net [209.112.136.102]) by alaska.net (8.9.1/8.9.1) with ESMTP id BAA22255; Thu, 4 Oct 2001 01:16:44 -0800 (AKDT) Received: by Hobbes.sodorline.home (Postfix, from userid 500) id 212A41E5E4; Wed, 3 Oct 2001 22:11:27 -0800 (AKDT) Date: Wed, 3 Oct 2001 22:11:26 -0800 From: James Zuelow To: Randy Pratt Cc: freebsd-newbies@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: long device names Message-ID: <20011003221126.E1810@Hobbes.sodorline.home> References: <200110040109.VAA07194@mail.ezwv.com> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit In-Reply-To: <200110040109.VAA07194@mail.ezwv.com>; from rpratt@ezwv.com on Wed, Oct 03, 2001 at 17:09:21 -0800 X-Mailer: Balsa 1.1.1 Lines: 50 Sender: owner-freebsd-newbies@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk List-ID: List-Archive: (Web Archive) List-Help: (List Instructions) List-Subscribe: List-Unsubscribe: X-Loop: FreeBSD.org On 2001.10.03 17:09 Randy Pratt wrote: > > Check out the Handbook section on Allocating Disk Space: > > http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/install-steps.html > > There is some information there about the disk layout and naming that > might > help some. > > HTH, > > Randy > OK, I see where all the numbers are coming from. So I'm guessing that a Linux partition = an fdisk partition, plain and simple (for primary partitions anyway). This is very much how DOS works - if you want more than 4 partitions (or DOS logical drives) you need to create an extended partition to hold the logical ones. OpenBSD appears to act like Linux, but when I look at the file system with fdisk I see that there are three units (slices?) 0-2 that are not used, and slice 3 uses the entire contents of the disk. Since I have more than one partition, the OpenBSD partitions are hidden inside the slice. Kind of like creating a big DOS extended partition without any primary partitions. FreeBSD uses more than one slice per partition, a slice being the four DOS partitions. There are no 'primary' or 'extended' partitions, in essence a DOS user would look at all four of them as 'extended' partitions that you can create logical drives on (the FreeBSD partitions). Is that more or less technically correct? I grew up on DOS, and understood the Linux ext2 partitioning straight off. OpenBSD appeared very similar from the command line, so I never looked into the inner workings of it (never had any trouble that required looking into). If the FreeBSD device names weren't so long I probably would not have found out about the details for quite a while. Since I don't double boot any of my machines, I've always just chose the 'use the entire disk' option for OpenBSD/FreeBSD without thinking much about it. Thanks for the info guys! -- James Z. -- "What is a packet, if its chief good and market of its time be but to route and wrap?" (Amazon.com) To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-newbies" in the body of the message