Introduction

Today's systems

Disk geometry

Disk partitions

File system
 

Practical Approach

Hardware setup

Partitions

Mount

Automate mount

        UNIX System Administration

Chapter 9: Adding a Disk

by Ying Zhao, Andrej Cedilnik
  June 10, 1999 


File systems

    Different types under different operating systems:

  • ext2 - for Linux
  • FAT / FAT32 - for DOS/Windows
  • NTFS - Windows NT
     Linux can read a lot of filesystems and write most of them.


A BSD filesystem consists of five structural components:
  • A set of inode storage cells
  • A set of scattered "superblock"
  • A map of the disk blocks in the filesystem
  • A block usage summary
  • A set of data blocks

SYNC command

      All system disks are cached. In order to clear caches, users must run sync command.  A single sync does not guarantee that all flushing operations have been completed by the time it returns, but a second sync will not start until previous sync has finished. For this reason, always run sync twice if you want to flush the caches.