Jul 16th, 2009
Partitioning a newly added disk in Freebsd
In Freebsd we are using the utility “sysinstall” for this purpose. Sysinstall is used for installation and configuration in the Freebsd. It’s GUI based tool in console. We can invoke the tool by typing sysinstall in the shell.
Freebsd uses the term “slice” for partitions. Before going to partitioning the disk let us be familiar with the disk device codes used in Freebsd. For ATAPI (IDE) disk the code “ad” is used and for SCSI disk we use the code “da”.
For example,
first IDE disk ———- ad0
second IDE disk ———- ad1
first SCSI disk ———- da0
second SCSI disk ———- da1
Each disk is divided into slices and each slice in further divided into partitions. The naming convention of slice is s1, s2, s3…. etc.. We are using letters a to h to designate partitions in the slice.
All together, we refer a partition by listing the disk code followed by slice number followed by partition letter.
For example,
ad1s3d — The forth partition in the third slice in the second IDE disk.
After invoking the sysinstall move to Configure >> Fdisk in the menu.
sysinstall >> Configure >> Fdisk
Once we get in to to the fdisk we are provided with a menu from where we can select the available disks in the system. We can use the navigate keys and tab to move through the options , space bar and return key for selecting the options. Select the new disk and click OK to continue. We then get into fdisk editor where we type A for selecting the entire disk for using with the freebsd.Then type W for writing the changes we are made. Type q to quit from the fdisk. We may get a Boot manager menu, where we choose “none” and select OK.
After selecting the disk we need to partition it. For this we need to invoke the “FreeBSD Disk Label Editor” via sysinstall >> Configure >> label in the menu.
sysinstall >> Configure >> label
Once we get into into label menu we need to create partition by typing C after selecting the appropriate slice. We then get a dialog box where we can specify the size of the partition. After specifying the size, a prompt, asking whether the partition to contain a file system or a swap space, will appear. We select the file system and press enter. Then a prompt for mount point will appear, where we specify the mount point. Type W to write the partition information in the disk and then type Q to quit from the Disk label editor.
We need to edit the /etc/fstab and issue “mount -a” to mount the newly partitioned disk
