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Hard Disk Partitioning

Before you can install FreeBSD, you need to create a partition for it on your hard disk. A partition is sort of like a container on the hard disk that is separated from other containers. For example, you might have one partition for Windows and another for FreeBSD, as shown in Figure 2.3.

Figure 2.3. Partitions on a hard disk.

FreeBSD's Hard Disk Naming

At the top of Figure 2.2 (shown previously) notice where it says Disk name: ad0. This is how FreeBSD names physical disks in the system. The names start at 0 rather than 1. So, ad0 is the first hard disk in the system. ad means that this hard disk is an ATA hard disk. If you ...