hit some FS/slice size limit?

Erik Trulsson ertr1013 at student.uu.se
Thu Nov 6 06:53:20 PST 2008


On Thu, Nov 06, 2008 at 03:34:55PM +0100, Christoph Kukulies wrote:
> I partitioned my Seagate 500 GB Sata drive  under the FreeBSD 7.1 
> sysinstall (booted from the install CD while having the drive attached 
> to USB on my notebook). When creating the filesystems I chose 472 G for 
> the / partition (wanted to put everything into one partition - yeah, I 
> know, one should
> granulate this finer, but I didn' t want to bother right now). I got 
> told that it could not create the slice
> (too big? it said). Hmm, is there some limit on a FreeBSD slice size?

There is a limit on FreeBSD slice size, but it is larger than that.

No, I suspect you just got caught out by different definitions of 'GB'
Segate (like all other harddisk manufacturers) uses the SI-prefixes
correctly and has 'G' mean one billion (1000,000,000).
So your disk is 500,000,000,000 bytes large (actually slightly more than
that.) This is about equal to 465*1024*1024*1024 or 465 of what FreeBSD (and
many other OSs) calls a 'GB'.

I.e. the 472 GB slice you tried to create is larger than the disk is.



( See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary_prefix for much information
about the different meanings of 'GB' and resulting confusion. )




-- 
<Insert your favourite quote here.>
Erik Trulsson
ertr1013 at student.uu.se


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