Fix It CD, bsdlabel, and /dev?

[doug at safeport.com]

On Fri, 3 Jul 2009, Drew Tomlinson wrote:

> Wojciech Puchar wrote:
>>>> However /dev/ad6s1a and /dev/ad8s1a do not exist. I do have entries such
>>>> as /dev/ad6a and/dev/ad8a but gmirror doesn't like those. What must I do
>>>> the get them to show after I've labeled?
>>> 
>>> If you have /dev/ad[68]a, it indicates that you haven't created a
>>> slice on those disks, instead you created one partition (a) on
>>> each of the disks.
>> 
>> there is completely NO REASON to create slices at all, unless you want to 
>> use windoze on the same drive.
>> 
>> i don't have slices on any of my FreeBSD systems
>
> I must admit I am confused by slices and partitions.  I only want to use 
> FreeBSD on this box.  It has 4 drives detected as follows:
>
Try http://www.freebsdwiki.net/ and search for 'disk partitions' Sections on

    Hard Disk Partition Sizes
    Partitioning Tips and Tricks

should be helpful. You can adapt these concepts to suit how your system is to be 
used and to take advantage of the hardware you have.