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5.1 Disk labels used by GNU/Linux and FreeBSD

Both GNU/Linux and FreeBSD systems are rather flexible about disk labels, supporting many different disk label types.

Because it is rather unusual for a machine to use hard disks with labels normally used on other architectures, standard distributions of the Linux kernel often only support the popular disk labels for the architecture for which the kernel was compiled. For example, a standard Linux kernel compiled for a PC will likely not have support for Mac or Sun disk labels. To access the file systems on disks with unsupported disk labels, the kernel will have to be recompiled.

FreeBSD has a disk label system that is incompatible with MSDOS partition tables, and a partition slice system that is compatible with MSDOS partition tables. Parted only supports the BSD disk label system. It is unlikely to support the partition slice system, because the semantics are rather strange, and don't work like "normal" partition tables do.


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