Manually partitioning using gpart

[Warren Block]

On Sun, 25 Nov 2012, Ralf Mardorf wrote:

> This is what I've got:
>
> # gpart show ada0
> =>      63   625142385 ada0 MBR (298G)
>        63   121274683 - free - (57G)
> [snip]
>
> IIUC I now have to do:
>
> # gpart add -s 64k -t freebsd-boot -l boot0 ada0
> # gpart add -s 8G -t freebsd-swap -l swap0  ada0
> # gpart add -t freebsd-ufs -a 256k -l root0 ada0

No.  MBR does not need or use a freebsd-boot partition.  Also, GPT 
labels don't work for MBR because, well, it's not GPT.

> Here I already don't understand how large the swap should be. Really 2 *
> size of the RAM?

No, that's less true than it used to be.  Depends on how much RAM you 
have, but the more RAM, the less you really need swap.  If disk space is 
not at a premium, I usually use 4G.

> I also don't know if 256k is a sane alignment value, I just copied this
> from a howto.

For a hard drive, 4K alignment and starting the main partition at 1M is 
good.

> How to continue after this is done?

Realize this multi-boot stuff is painful and inconvenient and install 
everything in a VM?