Date: Sun, 8 Aug 1999 23:02:48 -0700 From: Eric Lee Green <elgreen@iname.com> To: "Abe Rooter" <Abe@Nerdy.Org>, <freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG> Subject: Re: FreeBSD help Message-ID: <99080823134800.01150@ehome.local.net> References: <000701bee213$20e3ab40$668767cf@jaspa>
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On Sun, 08 Aug 1999, Abe Rooter wrote: > Hi. I am a Linux user switching over (attempting to at least) to FreeBSD. >It's version 3.2. During installation when I get to fdisk, I made 2 partitions. >One was 6000 megs for the root, and the other 80 megs for the swap. Then I hit >the 'Q' key, to finish up in fdisk. I couldn't label the disk partitions I had >just created. Ah. I see. You're trying to use the DOS partitions as FreeBSD partitions. Remember, BSD was invented before DOS was invented, so FreeBSD does not use DOS partitions except as a guide. It instead uses the BSD "disk label" to partition the disk. The partition is only used to detirmine where to put this "disk label" on the disk (if it's not in the MBR, it should be at the start of the partition). Well, it's a little more complicated than that, but this simplification is good enough for the moment. So delete that 80 meg partition that you created, start over again, create a 6080 megabyte partition, go on further into the install into the disk label editor, and use that to create your swap. Actually, if you're new, I'd recommend just accepting the defaults -- that is what I did on my machine at work (which has a 6.4gb IDE drive), and it resulted in something reasonable. The only thing to remember is that the default is to have a very small "/" partition, so if you're in the habit of mucking around with big files in /tmp, get in the habit of mucking around with big files in /usr/tmp instead (or go ahead and create a /tmp partition if the system is going to be in a multi-user environment rather than a personal workstation). Ah. One last thing. Your root partition must be label 'a', or the booter doesn't know what to do. The swap partition is typically label 'b', but really FreeBSD doesn't care (the installer cares, but FreeBSD itself doesn't). You could actually have used that DOS partition as a swap partition, but I will leave that as an excercise for your future learning. -- Eric Lee Green http://members.tripod.com/e_l_green mail: e_l_green@hotmail.com ^^^^^^^ Burdening Microsoft with SPAM! To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
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