Talk:Partitioning Tips and Tricks

How can I have FreeBSD tell me what kind of hard drive I have (serial number, manufacturer, etc)?

to the best of my knowlege, you can't. That info is printed on the hard drive itself. So you'd have to look at it -- open the case and take the disk out and write down all that info. You can get the system to tell you what kind of disk you have (ATA/SCSI, etc) and how it's been configured, but that's as far as that goes.

--Dave 11:20, 25 Jul 2005 (EDT)

sysutils/smartmontools

There is the sysutils/smartmontools port for SMART enabled drives. Running "smartctl -i /dev/ad4" on my system gives output like:

=== START OF INFORMATION SECTION ===
Device Model:    WDC WD2500JB-00EVA0
Serial Number:    WD-WCAEH1028140
Firmware Version: 15.05R15
Device is:        In smartctl database [for details use: -P show]
ATA Version is:  6
ATA Standard is:  Exact ATA specification draft version not indicated
Local Time is:    Thu Dec 22 10:48:33 2005 CST
SMART support is: Available - device has SMART capability.
SMART support is: Enabled

--Joe 12:13, 22 Dec 2005 (EST)

I have a very large edit to this file, summarizing different uses of the different partitions in the default system install... but it really doesn't fit well with alot of this information or this title. I would like to move some of this info over to this new article named "Hard Disk Partition Sizes" with something like the following TOC:

1. Official Information and Terms (Links to manpages and HB)
2. The Default Install
3. One Big Partition
4. The SWAP partition
5. The /tmp partition
6. The /var partition
   1. The /var/tmp directory
7. The /usr partition
   1. /usr/src directory
   2. /usr/ports directory
   3. /usr/local directory
8. The /home partition

The intended audience of this new file would be people new to FreeBSD who are not entirely sure what the different partitions are used for and why they might want to change the default sizes. If no one objects, I'll post the article and rearrange this article to lose duplicated information and probably move the above question into this article as well. --Joe 15:42, 22 Dec 2005 (EST)

sounds good, go for it

great idea...

--Dave 15:47, 22 Dec 2005 (EST)

What is the policy/style-guide for the Talk-chatting? I was mostly pursuing a plan of 1 section per topic... but I can work with whatever--Joe 15:54, 22 Dec 2005 (EST)

I need to get some sleep... but tommorow I'll clean this article and fold some of the comments into the article itself, as well as adding the proper categories to the other article. My previous question has been moved to Help_talk:Style Guidelines. --Joe 16:20, 22 Dec 2005 (EST)