On Friday 14 September 2001 8:48 pm, Simon Oliver wrote:

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The drive was a new drive (hdb) and never had a partition table on it. I figure new drives can be turned into partition less drives but once you

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a table written you must use one unless you low level format it again? I never had a partition table on this hdb drive and had it as well once in reiserfs format so it must work.

Na! You can't have a partition on a physical disk. There has to be either primary or extended partiton/logical drives.

Wrong! If a partition table exists (even an empty one) the program you use to format the device might complain. You can remove the partition table by writing a load of 0's to the device, say /dev/hdb, using `dd` then format the partition-less drive, specifying /dev/hdb as the device.

I stand corrected; I still have a Microsoft mindset I suppose. ;-) But why would you want to go to the trouble of doing this? I see no advantage. With one big block device you can no longer share the drive with another operating system and you can only have one file system on it. Perhaps that's the advantage afterall? M

** Reply to message from "Simon Oliver" on Sat, 15 Sep 2001 00:15:41 +0100 ** Well, I'm not saying there is an advantage - it's just possible! ** ** On one of my systems I have four 80GB IDE disks. These are configured (as ** raw devices with no partitions) as a single logical volume of 320GB using ** LVM. Why bother with partitions if they are not needed for a particular ** application? but then , everything is possible , no? the practicalities are what computers were intended to solve .. ( or prehaps sort into the most likely order ) It would seem that a bloody great disk such as you suggest is going to be a bottleneck , for the forsee-able future .. Not too sure I'd want anything that would spin fast enough to find all the bits of an article I might be working on, say, whenever I open it again.. at least I wouldn't want anything spinning that fast anywhere near my body ! <G> We had an experience here w/ a computer running w2k, which eveidently disaproved of an order ( command) it was given , spitting a disk in the cdrom across the room, narowly missing the head of the person who had entered the command to backup to that cd !!! That disk was spinning plenty fast ... I can tell you . ( I was a witness to this , rather than the one who entered the command ) As someone who has tried to ,easily, remove cds from that drive, I'd LOVE to know how it was thrown out of the holder like that !!!! this is the OT bit : Aside from the fact it was apparently something the computer resented having to do <G> ( I know, I'm anthromophising a bit, still ) the only other reason for it doing that might be that it was instructed to react that way by the Programmers from Washington ( state) to react badly to a request for a backup???? afterthought: tattoo.. a permanent reminder of a temporary feeling