Date: Sat, 10 Aug 2002 18:23:52 -0700 From: "Kevin Oberman" <oberman@es.net> To: "Eric" <swive@getnet.com> Cc: freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: difference between partition and slice? Message-ID: <20020811012352.C08065D04@ptavv.es.net> In-Reply-To: Your message of "Sat, 10 Aug 2002 11:40:01 -0800." <LJEKLADNACECPPOMAFPHGEEPCAAA.swive@getnet.com>
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> From: "Eric" <swive@getnet.com> > 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. R. Kevin Oberman, Network Engineer Energy Sciences Network (ESnet) Ernest O. Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) E-mail: oberman@es.net Phone: +1 510 486-8634 To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
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