Talk:BSD disklabel

What was the purpose of "d"

I know that it's no longer in use, but what was the purpose of partition/label "d" ?

One of the links described it as "obselete whole disk", but how did it then differ from partition/label "c" ? —Preceding unsigned comment added by Koppe (talk • contribs) 12:57, 8 February 2008 (UTC)

Traditionally, d had no special meaning, but in PC BSD ports (eg. FreeBSD/i386, NetBSD/i386 etc), d is used to correspond to the whole physical disk instead of the usual c partition. In these cases, c corresponded to the BIOS MBR partition subdivided into BSD partitions only, excluding other MBR partitions used by other operating systems. Letdorf (talk) 17:10, 8 February 2008 (UTC).

FreeBSD has not done this for quite some time now, probably more than a decade; there is no way that it could possibly work (but it's also unnecessary). It used to be, in ancient *BSD systems, that the kernel did not really understand nested partitioning schemes, so the disk block numbers in the disklabel were absolute (physical) block numbers, rather than relative to the beginning of the slice. The "d" partition was then needed to be able to access the other parts of the disk (for example, to update the master boot record). I don't think even FreeBSD 2.2 (1997) still had this. On modern systems, container boundaries are enforced strictly. You could dig through old release notes to see when exactly this changed. 121a0012 (talk) 04:46, 7 June 2012 (UTC)

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Original implementation

My very fuzzy recollection is that the original disklabel work was done in an Australian university (perhaps by Robert Elz) but CSRG reimplemented it from scratch for the 4.3-Tahoe release. 121a0012 (talk) 121a0012 (talk) 04:00, 18 August 2022 (UTC)

Specification about the OnDisk-Structures for the BSD-Disklabel

Is there any Specification about the OnDisk-Structures anywhere in the Internet? In the Article is none of the Links usefull. And google does not give any meaningfull Answer. Erik 2003:ED:F7FF:3962:99EF:C9F0:BD9C:CE7C (talk) 20:32, 27 October 2025 (UTC)