# FreeBSD Partitioning Funny



## penguinhead (Jun 8, 2009)

I have experience of installing FreeBSD. The first thing is, its partitioning is not as flexible as Linux and Windows partitioning. It warns me that you canot have more than one VFAT partitions. Its kinda strange because when, solely on Windows, I used upto 5 VFATs. The install still continues, because the subsequent VFATs are not formatted so. What will happen if I format them?

The BSD'ers earlier said on this forum, you can have 4 PRIMARY partitions and one EXTENDED partition. Did that mean 4 PRIMARY Partitions and another fifth EXTENDED partition? If I have a slice for BSD, would that be counted as an EXTENDED one, and will I be left out of capacity to have _that_ one EXTENDED partition? :\


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## Bunyan (Jun 8, 2009)

As I remember, 4 primary partitions(1-4) means 3 primary partitions + 1 extended, which is a special type of primary partition. The extended partition is a container for other logical partitions (5 +).
 FreeBSD can't be installed on an extended partition. The FreeBSD slice type A5 is equivalent to a BIOS primary partition.
The only operating system that can boot off a *logical*partition is *Linux*. In that respect, Linux is better than *BSD, but why would we bother, since *BSD is more logical and simple?


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## rocky (Jun 8, 2009)

penguinhead said:
			
		

> I have experience of installing FreeBSD. The first thing is, its partitioning is not as flexible as Linux and Windows partitioning. It warns me that you canot have more than one VFAT partitions. Its kinda strange because when, solely on Windows, I used upto 5 VFATs. The install still continues, because the subsequent VFATs are not formatted so. What will happen if I format them?
> 
> The BSD'ers earlier said on this forum, you can have 4 PRIMARY partitions and one EXTENDED partition. Did that mean 4 PRIMARY Partitions and another fifth EXTENDED partition? If I have a slice for BSD, would that be counted as an EXTENDED one, and will I be left out of capacity to have _that_ one EXTENDED partition? :\



Your partition is called "slice" in FreeBSD which may contain many partitions. Please read http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/disk-organization.html.


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## phoenix (Jun 8, 2009)

The BIOS partition table has only 4 slots available.  You can either have 4 Primary Partitions, or 3 Primary Partitions and 1 Extended Partition.

You can create as many Logical Partitions as you want inside the Extended Partition.

A FreeBSD slice uses up one of the Primary Partition slots.  You can then partition this slice up as many times as you need (I believe the limit is now 26, up from 8).

Personally, I prefer the FreeBSD method of partitioning, as you only need 1 BIOS Partition table slot per OS, and then you sub-divide that as needed.  I can't stand using multi-boot systems with 7+ partitions all visible at all times.  Would be so much nicer to use 1 for Windows, 1 for Linux, 1 for FreeBSD, and 1 for shared data, and then sub-divide those as needed.  Oh well, yet another massive failure from Microsoft (they went with the horrid partitioning scheme we're stuck with instead of the more robust Unix scheme that was already out there).


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## hedwards (Jun 9, 2009)

Bunyan said:
			
		

> As I remember, 4 primary partitions(1-4) means 3 primary partitions + 1 extended, which is a special type of primary partition. The extended partition is a container for other logical partitions (5 +).
> FreeBSD can't be installed on an extended partition. The FreeBSD slice type A5 is equivalent to a BIOS primary partition.
> The only operating system that can boot off a *logical*partition is *Linux*. In that respect, Linux is better than *BSD, but why would we bother, since *BSD is more logical and simple?


Not to be too cynical, but isn't that more or less a side effect of wanting to take over all of the primary partitions? It seems like the last time I installed Ubuntu it wanted to use 4 partition entries for the entire installation. Meaning that since I wanted to dual boot that, Windows and two types of FreeBSD that I couldn't really do that without Linux booting off of the logical.

Even if you go for a more sane Windows, Data Linux regime you're compelled to put the Linux installation on the logical drive just to avoid the headaches later on should you want to change the other partitions around.


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