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Date:      Wed, 3 Oct 2001 22:11:26 -0800
From:      James Zuelow <jfzuelow@alaska.net>
To:        Randy Pratt <rpratt@ezwv.com>
Cc:        freebsd-newbies@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Re: long device names
Message-ID:  <20011003221126.E1810@Hobbes.sodorline.home>
In-Reply-To: <200110040109.VAA07194@mail.ezwv.com>; from rpratt@ezwv.com on Wed, Oct 03, 2001 at 17:09:21 -0800
References:  <Pine.LNX.4.33.0110031600220.655-100000@Hobbes.sodorline.home> <200110040109.VAA07194@mail.ezwv.com>

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On 2001.10.03 17:09 Randy Pratt wrote:

> 
> Check out the Handbook section on Allocating Disk Space:
> 
> http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/install-steps.html
> 
> There is some information there about the disk layout and naming that
> might 
> help some.
> 
> HTH,
> 
> Randy
> 
OK, I see where all the numbers are coming from.  So I'm guessing that a
Linux partition = an fdisk partition, plain and simple (for primary
partitions anyway).  This is very much how DOS works - if you want more
than 4 partitions (or DOS logical drives) you need to create an extended
partition to hold the logical ones.

OpenBSD appears to act like Linux, but when I look at the file system
with fdisk I see that there are three units (slices?) 0-2 that are not
used, and slice 3 uses the entire contents of the disk.  Since I have
more than one partition, the OpenBSD partitions are hidden inside the
slice.  Kind of like creating a big DOS extended partition without any
primary partitions.

FreeBSD uses more than one slice per partition, a slice being the four
DOS partitions.  There are no 'primary' or 'extended' partitions, in
essence a DOS user would look at all four of them as 'extended'
partitions that you can create logical drives on (the FreeBSD
partitions).

Is that more or less technically correct?  I grew up on DOS, and
understood the Linux ext2 partitioning straight off.  OpenBSD appeared
very similar from the command line, so I never looked into the inner
workings of it (never had any trouble that required looking into).  If
the FreeBSD device names weren't so long I probably would not have found
out about the details for quite a while.  Since I don't double boot any
of my machines, I've always just chose the 'use the entire disk' option
for OpenBSD/FreeBSD without thinking much about it.

Thanks for the info guys!
-- 
James Z.
--
"What is a packet, if its chief good and market of its time be but to
route and wrap?" (Amazon.com)

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