Date: Mon, 22 May 2000 12:41:11 -0700 From: Kent Stewart <kstewart@3-cities.com> To: leegold <leegold@erols.com> Cc: FreeBSD-Questions@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: ques: partition, slice, disk label, mounting point Message-ID: <39298D57.955E8300@3-cities.com> References: <001601bfc3a1$f687a920$5edf7ad1@leegold1>
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leegold wrote: > > I've read tons of stuff on the web. still trying to understand the basics of > the FreeBSD installation. maybe if anyone could explain the following term, > concepts it would make a dent: > > disk labeling (vs. slices, partitions, mounting points ). > slices, (vs partitions, what's the difference). > mounting points. > how dirs (eg. \ ) are mounted to the partitions ( or is it slices ), why, > how, when? The \ concept has to go. It is now the way it was originally developed. Microsoft just didn't understand that the / key was easier to get to than the \ key was. It will be hard to talk to someone outside of the FreeBSD community about FreeBSD terminology. I have a great deal of trouble with the term slice. No matter what you do that conflicts with current terminology. It is the 100+K FreeBSD users against the 100+M users that don't understand. If you add a FreeBSD slice to an HD, your bios talks about it being a partition. I think we used a terminology that goes against the wind so to speak. When you think about the term slice, it also fits because you have really sliced the drive up and are creating a super extended partition. Since I am used to the FreeBSD usage, trying to install Linux on a system has been difficult. I need one system that will boot Linux and setting up one on my systems is really difficult. I don't have any problem adding FreeBSD and it is because of the slice concept. I added FreeBSD to an old system with NT 4 on it and both needed to be under 8GB to boot. The FreeBSD 4.0 slice located after the extended partition containing the NT boot worked just fine. It also made copying the existing disk structure from a 5GB to a 20GB a snap :). Some rules are: an HD can have 4 primary partitions on it. One of those partitions can be an extended partition. A slice is a primary partition and you can have more than 1. A slice can be larger than 8.4GB and your system will boot if and only if your / parition is separated from the other partitions. The / partition has to be totatly located in front of cylinder 1024, which is ~8.4GB using LBA. I go with a 100MB / partition and that has around 30% freespace. I separate out /var, /tmp, and /usr. I have a 500MB /var, a 1.5GB /tmp, and everything else is assigned to /usr. These sizes are extremely generous. When you have 12GB free, what is 500MB more or less :). Each FreeBSD partition is a mount point. Since they mount onto your / partition, they need unique names. The names for /, /var, /tmp, and /usr are not variables. They have to mount with those names precisely. Changing /usr to /kent would be like renaming your windows/system32 to /windows/lee and expecting windows to work. It won't. I add my users in /home which is linked to /usr/home. I can cd to ~seti and end up in /home/seti. The advantage in using the /home concept. There is a lot to learn. Have fun, Kent > > Thanks (newbie) > > To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org > with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message -- Kent Stewart Richland, WA mailto:kstewart@3-cities.com http://www.3-cities.com/~kstewart/index.html FreeBSD News http://daily.daemonnews.org/ SETI(Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) @ HOME http://setiathome.ssl.berkeley.edu/ To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
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