One disk, one filesystem, no partitions?

One disk, one filesystem, no partitions?

[Ketil Froyn]

Hi.

I have a question regarding something I came across a while ago. A
filesystem (reiserfs) had been set up on a disk without making any
partitions. The entry in /etc/fstab looked something like this:

/dev/hdc	/mount/point	reiserfs	defaults	0 0

When I saw this, I instinctively partitioned the drive so that /dev/hdc1
was mounted instead. But was this really necessary? If I want to put only
one filesystem on a disk, do I need to partition at all? It seemed to work
fine before I changed it. I had just never heard of this before, and
automatically assumed that the problems the box was having could be
related to this.

Ketil

Re: One disk, one filesystem, no partitions?

[Helge Hafting]

Ketil Froyn wrote:
> 
> Hi.
> 
> I have a question regarding something I came across a while ago. A
> filesystem (reiserfs) had been set up on a disk without making any
> partitions. The entry in /etc/fstab looked something like this:
> 
> /dev/hdc        /mount/point    reiserfs        defaults        0 0
> 
> When I saw this, I instinctively partitioned the drive so that /dev/hdc1
> was mounted instead. But was this really necessary? If I want to put only
> one filesystem on a disk, do I need to partition at all? It seemed to work
> fine before I changed it. I had just never heard of this before, and
> automatically assumed that the problems the box was having could be
> related to this.

fs'es are mounted from block devices, and /dev/hdc
is as much block device as /dev/hdc1.  Just like a
floppy - they don't have partition tables either.

Booting off such a thing will work too, if the bios
don't make assumptions about partitioning.  They
used not to, last time I looked the pc bios simply
executes the first sector of the disk and
the code there have do support partitions itself
if necessary.

I see no need to partition such a beast into
a single big partition - you just loose 
a sector to the partition table.  

Helge Hafting