Dirk Moolman wrote:
If you have a disk, let's say /dev/sda, and instead of creating partitions on the disk, for example /dev/sda1, you use the entire disk, format it, and allocate it to an application - will this cause any problems ?
Yes...you don't have a partition table. While Linux can use that...you're really violating all kinds of standards. All that for the purpose of saving 1 block or 2 blocks (512 - 1024 bytes) is normally not a good tradeoff. I would consider this sort of thing appropriate for a deep-space probe which will never return to Earth MUCH more than any disk drive which is going to stay here, and has a real chance (say for data recovery or whatever) get thrown into another system. This is the kind of thing which causes potential problems which take hours to resolve because you forget something...or worse, someone uses fdisk to re-create the partition table, and overwrites the first 1k of your filesystem
In short: the application points to and uses /dev/sda (which is mounted), instead of /dev/sda1.
Applications don't point to /dev/sd_anything, (or any other block device for that matter) unless you are talking about an Oracle or other database using the disk in raw mode. Applications use normal files within a filesystem, not partitions. Even Oracle should use, say /dev/sdc1, not /dev/sdc. Using the space reserved for the partition table is just begging for data loss if the disk is ever removed and put into another computer, for whatever reason. -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org