[nycbug-talk] Going crazy

[Jim Brown]

* Joshua S. Freeman <jfreeman at nybg.org> [2005-08-05 16:19]:
> So, finally I'm getting around to installing FreeBSD on my IBM T42 laptop.
> 
> I'm using Fdisk to create the partitions...
> 
> I'm trying to do:
> 
> ad0s1 /
> ad0s2 swap
> ad0s3 /var
> ad0s4 /tmp
> ad0s5 /usr
> 
> Everything goes fine except when it's time to create the fifth slice
> (ad0s5).  All the other slices come up wth the expected names (ad0s1 -
> ad0s4) but the last slice always comes up as name 'X'.
> 
> When I go to install it can't create /usr because it can't figure out what
> 'X' is or how to mount it.
> 
> Can anyone help out here?
> 
> J.

Hi Joshua,

Looks like you are confusing 'slices' and 'partitions'.  The BSD family
uses slices inside a disk partition to allocate filesystems.


The BSD disk naming scheme is fully described in:

http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/disk-organization.html

http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/install-steps.html

http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=disklabel&apropos=0&sektion=0&manpath=FreeBSD+5.4-RELEASE+and+Ports&format=html




Briefly, here are my filesystems:

/dev/ad0s1a on / (ufs, local)
/dev/ad0s1e on /home (ufs, local, soft-updates)
/dev/ad0s1f on /opt (ufs, local, soft-updates)
/dev/ad0s1g on /tmp (ufs, local, soft-updates)
/dev/ad0s1d on /usr (ufs, local, soft-updates)
/dev/ad0s1h on /var (ufs, local, soft-updates)


The BSD OS always allocates any  swap on ddnsnb
and the full disk character device at ddnsnc 
where 'ddn' is the disk type and number and
'sn' is the slice number.

So my swap and charcter disk device  are actually /dev/ad0s1b and /dev/ad0s1c


Hope this helps,
Jim B.