From owner-freebsd-questions Sat Aug 10 18:51:51 2002 Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from mx1.FreeBSD.org (mx1.FreeBSD.org [216.136.204.125]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 6148137B400 for ; Sat, 10 Aug 2002 18:51:49 -0700 (PDT) Received: from wantadilla.lemis.com (wantadilla.lemis.com [192.109.197.80]) by mx1.FreeBSD.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 7D90043E75 for ; Sat, 10 Aug 2002 18:51:47 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from grog@lemis.com) Received: by wantadilla.lemis.com (Postfix, from userid 1004) id 7A41C81459; Sun, 11 Aug 2002 11:21:44 +0930 (CST) Date: Sun, 11 Aug 2002 11:21:44 +0930 From: Greg 'groggy' Lehey To: Kevin Oberman Cc: Eric , freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: difference between partition and slice? Message-ID: <20020811015144.GE31770@wantadilla.lemis.com> References: <20020811012352.C08065D04@ptavv.es.net> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: inline In-Reply-To: <20020811012352.C08065D04@ptavv.es.net> User-Agent: Mutt/1.3.99i Organization: The FreeBSD Project Phone: +61-8-8388-8286 Fax: +61-8-8388-8725 Mobile: +61-418-838-708 WWW-Home-Page: http://www.FreeBSD.org/ X-PGP-Fingerprint: 9A1B 8202 BCCE B846 F92F 09AC 22E6 F290 507A 4223 Sender: owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk List-ID: List-Archive: (Web Archive) List-Help: (List Instructions) List-Subscribe: List-Unsubscribe: X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG On Saturday, 10 August 2002 at 18:23:52 -0700, Kevin Oberman wrote: >> From: "Eric" >> 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