Partitions on Local Disks
This module allows you to create slices and partitions on disks attached to
a FreeBSD system. There are three levels of objects that have to be taken
managed on a FreeBSD system, compared to only two on Linux :
- Disks
- A disk is a physical drive attached to the system, either internally or via
an external bus like USB. Disks can be either SCSI or IDE.
- Slices
- A slice is part of a disk whose extents are stored in the disk's partition
table. On a Linux or Windows system these are called "Partitions".
- Partition
- A slice can contain up to four partitions, each of which can contain either
a filesystem or be used for virtual memory.
After adding a new disk to a system, you will need to first add a slice
to it (or change the existing slice type to BSD/386), and then add a partition
of type 4.2BSD within that slice.
The sizes and ranges of disks, slices and partitions are all measured in blocks,
which are typically 512 bytes in size.