Date: Mon, 09 Jul 2012 12:50:16 +0100 From: Bruce Cran <bruce@cran.org.uk> To: Polytropon <freebsd@edvax.de> Cc: Carmel <carmel_ny@hotmail.com>, Thomas Mueller <mueller23@insightbb.com>, freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Format a USB flash drive using gpart Message-ID: <4FFAC578.4050003@cran.org.uk> In-Reply-To: <20120709121608.1bce238e.freebsd@edvax.de> References: <47.B3.06836.B9F4AFF4@smtp02.insight.synacor.com> <20120709121608.1bce238e.freebsd@edvax.de>
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On 09/07/2012 11:16, Polytropon wrote: > If you're talking about an MS-DOS disk, then yes, it contains > a DOS partition which is formatted. In FreeBSD, we would call > it a slice (slice == "DOS primary partition"). In this case, > there is no (sub)partitioning, the _slice_ carries the MS-DOS > file system here. You know that MS-DOS does not have support > for partitioning. Floppy disks aren't partitioned/sliced - they use 'dangerously dedicated' mode, containing nothing except the filesystem. The way you'd mount it would be: mount /dev/fd0 /mnt/point You can do the same with a normal USB or other disk using: newfs /dev/da0 mount /dev/da0 /mnt/point The reason it's called 'dangerously dedicated' I think is that other systems - or even the same system months/years later if you forget and run the wrong tools - won't know there's a filesystem there and it's easy to think the disk's empty. If you're on an old system and run 'gpart show da0' and don't see a partition table it's quite easy to forget to check if da0 itself contains a filesystem. When using GPT what were called slices are now partitions, and instead of 'ada0s1a' (disk 0, slice 1, partition a) you just have 'ada0p1'. A partition table supports up to 4096 entries (gpart creates one supporting 128 by default) so there's no need for the freebsd container any more - you just create freebsd-boot, freebsd-ufs, freebsd-zfs, freebsd-swap entries e.g. 'gpart add -t freebsd-ufs -s 64g da0'. -- Bruce Cran
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