FreeBSD® Unleashed

Chapter 19. Understanding Hard Disks and Filesystems

In This Chapter

• IDE/ATA Access Modes

• SCSI Disks

• Understanding Hard Disk Geometry

• Partitioning a Hard Disk

• Creating the Disk Labels

• Making the Filesystem Available for Use

This chapter will try to make sense of what is surely one of the ugliest parts of dealing with a UNIX system: disks. Compared to a Windows system (where a disk is automatically assigned a drive number by the BIOS) or a Macintosh (where a new disk simply appears on the desktop), UNIX systems require a deeper knowledge of geometry, partitions, access modes, and other such esoterica. FreeBSD is, unfortunately, no exception.

As we discussed in Chapter 9, “The FreeBSD Filesystem,” the hierarchical filesystem structure of UNIX does allow ...