Boot Drive Nomenclature and How to Figure it out

[Martin McCormick]

Adam Vande More writes:
> Would doing something like:
> 
> gpart list
> 
> help?

	Thank you. I have never heard of gpart before so I gave
it a try and that helps very much if the drive is already
formatted. Most of these drives I plan to encounter will be
formatted so this basically solves the problem but it raises a
new question. If one does

gpart list as suggested and the disk is formatted, one gets
exactly the information necessary. I believe it is even the
first line of output. It doesn't get better than that. If the
disk is not corrected formatted such as might happen with
corruption or maybe a new drive, gpart list executes silently
and prints nothing on the output.

	As I said, you answered my question so many thanks. The
new question might best be put:

Okay, if nothing is there, where did gpart look to see nothing?

Martin McCormick