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 got 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. -- Simon Oliver