Understanding Disklabels

The OpenBSD installer expects you to understand disklabels. You can avoid learning about disklabels by blindly accepting the default partitioning OpenBSD offers, but that won’t take you very far. Disklabels might look intimidating to the new user and require some basic math, but they aren’t that difficult once you walk through them slowly. You need to understand disk geometry first.

Sectors and Lies

Once upon a time, disk drives had clearly defined geometry. Each disk was actually round, and it spun inside the hard drive. The manufacturer divided each disk into tiny sections, called sectors. Each sector had a number, with sector 0 at the beginning of the disk and the sectors numbered sequentially until the end of ...

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