How do I create large partitions in FreeBSD?

[Peter Steele]

>Excuse me, you're mixing up terminology here. Let me explain:
>
>A SLICE is what "Windows" calls a "DOS primary partition", often just named a "partition".

Yes, I know what a BSD slice is compared to a BSD partition. Considering that fdisk uses "partition" interchangeably in cases with "slice", I often do as well. I guess it can be confusing if one isn't careful with context.

>I'm not sure if I understood you correctly. You won't need to create three slices, just one slice, containin three partitions.

We already have a configuration in place on our smaller 1U boxes which are divided into three slices, one for the OS (with 2 partitions), one for swap, and the third slice for data. The third slice is divided into two partitions, one UFS and one raw. The first two slices are gmirrored, the third slice is not.

For consistency we want to use the same slice configuration for these large drives. We don't *have* to do it this way but it simplifies things for our legacy code. We're not using any gmirroring on these raid boxes of course, and we only need one partition on the third slice (no raw partition) but otherwise the layout will largely be the same.