One disk, one filesystem, no partitions?

Ketil Froyn
2002-06-04T15:25:13Z

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