Figure 1.6: Boot Manager selection

Once you do this, the installer will take you to the Disklabel menu.

Partitioning

Now we come to the first tricky part: how to partition the hard drive. Unlike other operating systems that just hack up the drive in various sections, FreeBSD allows you to control where each partition lies on the hard drive. This is important for a variety of reasons.

Each partition is accessible to the user as a mount point. In Windows, each partition has a mount point of a letter, (such as C: or D:). In UNIX, all partitions and disks are part of a single directory tree. A partition is assigned a directory and is said to be "mounted" at that directory. You can have one partition for the root of your directory tree (/), and can assign others arbitrarily. For example, if you're building a large−capacity Web server, you might have a hard drive partition dedicated to Web sites, and mount it as /www. We'll discuss how to assign mount points and partition your drive.

FreeBSD normally uses four different basic partitions: / (or root), swap space, /var, and /usr. If you're already familiar with UNIX, you might wish to create additional partitions and assign them mount points of your choosing. We'll discuss each of the main partitions, as well as some considerations for their size and placement.

Note Here and there we'll mention another possible partition you might create. If you're not familiar with that partition, just skip over it; more experienced administrators can take or ignore that advice as they choose.

The first thing to note is that the outer edge of the disk moves more quickly; thus, the closer a file is to the edge of the disk, the faster it can be accessed or altered. Place your most important files close to the edge so you can read and write to them more quickly, and put your more static data closer to the center. (Data access on a spinning hard drive is much like a merry−go−round; you can sit in the middle and hardly feel anything, but lie with your head dangling over the edge, and in a few minutes you won't be able to stand up.[3])

You edit partitions on a drive with the Disklabel menu (shown in Figure 1.7).

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