# slice, disklabel p?



## sigflup (Mar 30, 2012)

Hey, I'm coming from OpenBSD. I installed freebsd FreeBSD last night. I have a newbie question. Why is my / partition ata0p2 and not something like ata0s4a or ata0a? bsdlabel on at0 says there is no label. what does p2 mean? I understand s is slice, what's p? 

*T*hank you for your time.


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## wblock@ (Mar 30, 2012)

The difference is the partitioning scheme.  The traditional scheme is MBR partitions ("s" for slice, as these are called) and then bsdlabel(8) "partitions" ("a", "d", "e", etc) inside each slice.

GPT partitioning is simpler and more powerful than MBR/bsdlabel.  Up to 128 partitions on a disk means no messing around with only four MBR partitions and then dividing them up with bsdlabels.  Just use them directly.  The letter "p" is used for GPT partitions.


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## sigflup (Mar 30, 2012)

*T*hank you.


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