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editor" here and in the docs. People have come to understand "FDISK" as a more generic term and have been complaining that they didn't equate the "master" partition editor with the old fdisk stage and were confused.
78 lines
3.7 KiB
Plaintext
78 lines
3.7 KiB
Plaintext
This is the FreeBSD DiskLabel Editor.
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If you're new to this installation, then you should first understand
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how FreeBSD 2.0.5's new "slices" paradigm for looking at disk storage
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works. It's not very hard to understand. A "fully qualified slice name",
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that is the name of the file we open in /dev to talk to the slice,
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is optionally broken into 3 parts:
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First you have the disk name. Assume we have two SCSI
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drives in our system, which gives us `sd0' and `sd1'.
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Next you have the "Slice" (or "FDISK Partition") number,
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as seen in the Partition Editor. Assume that our sd0 contains
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two slices, a FreeBSD slice and a DOS slice. This gives us
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sd0s1 and sd0s2. Let's also say that sd1 is completely devoted
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to FreeBSD, so we have only one slice there: sd1s1.
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Next, if a slice is a FreeBSD slice, you have a number of
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(confusingly named) "partitions" you can put inside of it.
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These FreeBSD partitions are where various filesystems or swap
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areas live, and using our hypothetical two-SCSI-disk machine
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again, we might have something like the following layout on sd0:
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Name Mountpoint
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---- ----------
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sd0s1a /
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sd0s1b <swap space>
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sd0s1e /usr
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Because of historical convention, there is also a short-cut,
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or "compatibility slice", that is maintained for easy access
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to the first FreeBSD slice on a disk for those programs which
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still don't know how to deal with the new slice scheme.
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The compatibility slice names for our filesystem above would
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look like:
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Name Mountpoint
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---- ----------
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sd0a /
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sd0b <swap space>
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sd0e /usr
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FreeBSD automatically maps the compatibility slice to the first
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FreeBSD slice it finds (in this case, sd0s1). You may have multiple
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FreeBSD slices on a drive, but only the first one may be the
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compatibility slice!
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The compatibility slice will eventually be phased out, but
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it is still important right now for several reasons:
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1. Some programs, as mentioned before, still don't work
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with the slice paradigm and need time to catch up.
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2. The FreeBSD boot blocks are unable to look for
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a root file system in anything but a compatibility
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slice right now. This means that our root will always
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show up on "sd0a" in the above scenario, even though
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it really lives over on sd0s1a and would otherwise be
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referred to by its full slice name.
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Once you understand all this, then the label editor becomes fairly
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simple. You're either carving up the FreeBSD slices displayed at the
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top of the screen into smaller pieces (displayed in the middle of the
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screen) and then putting FreeBSD file systems on them, Or you're just
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mounting existing partitions/slices into your filesystem hierarchy;
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this editor lets you do both. Since a DOS partition is also just
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another slice as far as FreeBSD is concerned, you can mount one into
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in your filesystem hierarchy just as easily with this editor. For
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FreeBSD partitions you can also toggle the "newfs" state so that
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the partitions are either (re)created from scratch or simply checked
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and mounted (the contents are preserved).
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When you're done, type `Q' to exit.
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No actual changes will be made to the disk until you (C)ommit from the
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Install menu! You're working with what is essentially a copy of
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the disk label(s), both here and in the FDISK Partition Editor.
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