Re: One disk, one filesystem, no partitions?

Helge Hafting
2002-06-05T07:56:33Z

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