The following commands are supported (in upper or lower case)

C = Create         D = Delete         M = Mount pt.
N = Newfs Opts     T = Newfs Toggle   U = Undo       Q = Finish
A = Auto Defaults for all!

Use F1 or ? to get more help, arrow keys to select.
 

NOTE: If you're entering this editor from the update procedure then you probably shouldn't (C)reate anything at all but rather use only the (M)ount command to check and mount existing partitions for upgrading.

If you would like the label editor to do most of the following foy you, simply type 'A' for automatic partitioning of the disk.

If you wish to create partitions manually you may do so by moving the highlighted selection bar with the arrow keys over the FreBSD partition(s) displayed at the top of the screen. Typing (C)reate while a partition with available free space is selected will allow you to create a BSD partition inside of it using some or all of its available space.

Typing (M)ount over an existing partition entry (displayed in the middle of the screen) will allow you to set a mount point for it without initializing it. If you want it initialized, use the (T)oggle command to flip the Newfs flag. When Newfs is set to "Y", the filesystem in question will be ERASED and rebuilt from scratch!

You should use this editor to create at least the following filesystems:

Name    Purpose               Min Size?         Optional?
----    -------               ---------         ---------
/       Root filesystem       20MB              No
swap    Swap space            2 * MEM           No
/usr    System & user files   80MB or more      Yes

Swap space is a little tricker, and the rule of "2 * MEM" is simply a best-guess approximation and not necessarily accurate for your intended usage of the system. If you intend to use the system heavily in a server or multi-user application, you may be well advised to increase this size. You may also create swap space on multiple drives for a larger "total" swap and this is, in fact, recommended if you have multiple, fast drives for which such load-balancing can only help overall I/O performance.

The /usr filesystem should be sized according to what kind of distributions you're trying to load and how many packages you intend to install in locations like /usr/local. You can also make /usr/local a separate filesystem if you don't want to risk filling up your /usr by mistake.

Another useful filesystem to create is /var, which contains mail, news printer spool files and other temporary items. It is a popular candidate for a separate partition and should be sized according to your estimates of the amount of mail, news or spooled print jobs that may be stored there.

WARNING: If you do not create a separate filesystem for /var, space for such files will be allocated out of the root (/) filesystem instead. You may therefore wish to make the / partition bigger if you expect a lot of mail or news and do not want to make /var its own partition.

If you're new to this installation, you might also want to read the following explanation of how FreeBSD's new "slice" paradigm for looking at disk storage works:

In FreeBSD's new system, a device name can be broken up into up to 3 parts. Take a typical name like "/dev/sd0s1a":

The first three characters represent the drive name. If we had a system with two SCSI drives on it then we'd see /dev/sd0 and /dev/sd1 as the device entries representing the entire drives.

Next you have the "slice" (or "FDISK Partition") number as seen in the Partition Editor. Assuming that our sd0 contained two slices, a FreeBSD slice and a DOS slice, that would give us /dev/sd0s1 and /dev/sd0s2 as device entries pointing to the entire slices.

Next if a slice is a FreeBSD slice, you can have a number of (confusingly named) "partitions" inside of it.

These partitions are where various filesystems or swap areas live, and using our hupothetical two-SCSI-disk machine again, we might have something like the following layout on da0:

Name            Mountpoint
----            ----------
da0s1a          /
da0s1b          <swap space>
da0s1e          /usr

You can also use the label editor to mount existing partitions/slices into your filesystem hierarchy, as is frequently done for DOS FAT slices. For FreeBSD partitions, you can also toggle the "newfs" state so that the partitions are either (re)created from scratch or simply checked and mounted (the contents are preserved).

Whey you're done, type 'Q' to exit.

No actual changes will be made to the disk until you (C)ommit from the Install menu or (W)rite directly from this one. You're working with what is essentially a copy of the disk label(s), both here and in the FDISK Partition Editor, and the actual on-disk labels won't be affected by any changes you make until you explicitly say so.