Using a hard drive without partitions

[Nikolas Britton]

On 7/30/05, Chad Leigh -- Shire.Net LLC <chad at shire.net> wrote:
> 
> On Jul 30, 2005, at 2:26 AM, Nikolas Britton wrote:
> 
> > What are the ramifications, good or bad, of not using partitions on a
> > FreeBSD disk?.
> 
> My understanding is that if you use partitions in a standard way,
> other operating systems that may be or in the future be on the system
> in question will not wipe out your FreeBSD installation on the

Don't you mean slice? In BSD land slice = IBM PC partition and
partitions, in BSD, are divisions of a slice. Yes it's confusing....

> "dangerously dedicated" disk.  There is nothing inherent wrong with
> DD but it is more dangerous if other OSes may be involved.  I have
> used both sorts of layouts and have never had any problems, yet
> again, my computers were servers that would never have another OS
> anywhere near them...

Correct about DD... This array will NEVER be used with another OS and
It will NEVER be booted from.... The disk array will never show it's
self in DOS because it needs special drivers. In FreeBSD I want it to
show up as one big disk and just mount it as /data or something to
that effect.

The equivalent in MS-DOS / PC World to what I want to do is make a
primary partition that spans the whole drive. In BSD land this would
be da0s1c.... but from what I've read the c partition (BSD partition)
is reserved and can't be used.