Using a hard drive without partitions

[Stijn Hoop]

Hi,

On Sat, Jul 30, 2005 at 12:38:57PM -0500, Nikolas Britton wrote:
> 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?.

As far as my understanding goes, it is an artifact of ye olde days, and
should not be used again. There are ramifications for 'tasting' the label
on the disk etc, however I do not know what the impact is -- it might
just work, or it might not.

> 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.

So just create one primary slice using fdisk, and then label the disk
with disklabel -e and copy & paste the 'c' line to an 'a' line.
Then use da0s1a for newfs & mount. The amount of space wasted is
negligible nowadays (~10mb or so I guess) and it may just save you in
the future if/when support for DD mode goes away (not that I know it will,
but you never know...).

HTH,

--Stijn

-- 
Apparently, 1 in 5 people in the world are Chinese. And there are 5 people
in my family, so it must be one of them. It's either my mum or my dad......
or maybe my older brother John. Or my younger brother Ho-Cha-Chu. But I'm
pretty sure it's John.
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