From owner-freebsd-questions Sun Sep 16 0:51:13 2001 Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from mail5.nc.rr.com (fe5.southeast.rr.com [24.93.67.52]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id D285B37B40B for ; Sun, 16 Sep 2001 00:51:09 -0700 (PDT) Received: from i8k.babbleon.org ([66.57.85.154]) by mail5.nc.rr.com with Microsoft SMTPSVC(5.5.1877.687.68); Sat, 15 Sep 2001 23:31:36 -0400 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" From: Brian T.Schellenberger To: Fergus Cameron , questions@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: i dont unsterstand the disk label maker Date: Sat, 15 Sep 2001 23:31:20 -0400 X-Mailer: KMail [version 1.2] References: <1000475917.3ba20d0dee7b2@webmail.neomedia.it> <20010914151110.A2094@dedog.argus-systems.co.uk> In-Reply-To: <20010914151110.A2094@dedog.argus-systems.co.uk> MIME-Version: 1.0 Message-Id: <01091523312002.16877@i8k.babbleon.org> Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit 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 Friday 14 September 2001 10:11, Fergus Cameron wrote: > > Fdisk makes (Unix) slices (the same as DOS *primary* partitions); > > disklabel actually makes (Unix) partitions (subdivisions within a slice). > > i think you have the terminology back to front & technically there is no > DOS partition involved. > > there IBM partitions on your disk. BSD will take one of those partions for > it's own & allow you to create slices within it. Not quite. There are BIOS partitions on your disk, which FreeBSD calls "slices"; eg, ad0s1. Within them there are Unix partitions, not slices. > > you can therefore have on BSD partition with many slices. No, you can have a BSD slice (BIOS partition) with many partitions. > > the other three paritions can be of another type, DOS, EXT_DOS, etc. BSD slices / BIO partitions > i would think of unix slices like logical drives in DOS. you take one > primary partion & allow many logical elements inside it. Yes, BSD partitions are like logical partitions; BSD slices are like physical partitions. > > that aside yes, fdisk alters the fixed disk's parition table & disklabel > changes the parition's unix labellling (i.e. slices). (i.e. partitions) That's why it's ad0s1a and so forth: a (what *does* the a stand for anyway) d0 disk 0 (disks are zero-indexed) /* hardware controls this */ s1 slice 1 (slices are one-indexed; who said this had to make sense) /* fdisk controls this */ a a=boot partition; b=swap; c=entire disk; d-h=other partitions /* disklabel controls this */ > > To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org > with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message -- Brian T. Schellenberger . . . . . . . bts@wnt.sas.com (work) Brian, the man from Babble-On . . . . bts@babbleon.org (personal) http://www.babbleon.org --------------------> Free Dmitry Sklyarov! <------------------------- http://www.eff.org http://www.programming-freedom.org To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message