Date: Sun, 11 Aug 2002 11:21:44 +0930 From: Greg 'groggy' Lehey <grog@FreeBSD.org> To: Kevin Oberman <oberman@es.net> Cc: Eric <swive@getnet.com>, freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: difference between partition and slice? Message-ID: <20020811015144.GE31770@wantadilla.lemis.com> In-Reply-To: <20020811012352.C08065D04@ptavv.es.net> References: <LJEKLADNACECPPOMAFPHGEEPCAAA.swive@getnet.com> <20020811012352.C08065D04@ptavv.es.net>
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On Saturday, 10 August 2002 at 18:23:52 -0700, Kevin Oberman wrote: >> From: "Eric" <swive@getnet.com> >> Date: Sat, 10 Aug 2002 11:40:01 -0800 >> Sender: owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG >> >> Hi, >> >> What's the difference between partition and slice? >> >> Is there a technical distinction? >> >> Or is it just that you use one term in unix world and another term in >> windows world? > > It is both technical and semantic. > > Unix has always broken up a disk into partitions. Traditionally the > 'a' partition was used for root, 'b' for swap, 'c' for the complete > disk, and so on. This pre-dates PCs and BIOS. > > The PC and its tightly bound BIOS was designed without considering the > Unix partition and set up a standard for disk organization that > allowed no more than 4 partitions and they really look like separate > disk drives. This is not suitable for Unix, so the BSD folks porting > to i386 systems decided to treat the BIOS partitions as separate disks > and re-dub them "slices". They then created Unix partitions within > those. So a BIOS partition is call a 'slice' under FreeBSD and BSD > 'partitions' are sub-parts of the Unix 'slice'. > > Hope this is a bit clearer. It's really not too complex, but the > terminology can make it very confusing. In a nutshell: BIOS BSD partition slice extended partition partition Greg -- When replying to this message, please copy the original recipients. If you don't, I may ignore the reply. For more information, see http://www.lemis.com/questions.html See complete headers for address and phone numbers To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
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