[wplug] formatting raw devices was: unable to mount disk

Jonathan Billings billings at negate.org
Mon May 26 01:21:55 EDT 2003


On Sun, May 25, 2003 at 09:08:08PM -0400, John Harrold wrote:
> Sometime in May Jonathan Billings assaulted the keyboard and produced:
> 
> | In the future, try creating partitions before formatting a disk. 
> 
> just out of curiosity, what's the benefit to creating a partition? i can
> understand if you want to put /var, /, /home, etc. on the same disk you
> would want to create partitions. is there any benefit if you just want to
> create one large disk?

Even if you wanted to have only one partition, you should create that
partition, /dev/hdf1, which spans the entire disk.  If you don't have
a partition table on a disk, you'll run into problems like you had 
with this recent installation.  You certainly wouldn't be able to 
boot off the disk if you wanted to.  While it's possible to do what
you did with linux, it would confuse the hell out of most operating 
systems.  Without a proper partition table, there's no way to know how
the disk is formatted at all.  

 Jonathan Billings
billings at negate.org



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