Using a hard drive without partitions

[Gary W. Swearingen]

Glenn Dawson <glenn at antimatter.net> writes:

> The only danger in not having the slice table is that if you use non
> BSD tools, such as the ones that come with windows, they will
> potentially write over things that that you don't want them to.

The FreeBSD FAQ mentions more serious dangers.

> Also, without the slice table on your boot disk, the BIOS wont know
> what to do since it looks for the active slice and attempts to boot
> it.

A i386-standard PC BIOS shouldn't, by itself, try to boot anything
except the boot code in the MBR.  That code can then use the BIOS just
for reading more boot code from the disk, without any partition table
considerations.  That's why most PCs can boot a DD FreeBSD sys.

(As soon as enough code is read in, the BIOS can be dispensed with
entirely and the 1024'th cyl exceeded even with non-LBA BIOSes. I'm
not sure which booters, if any, do this, but probably Lilo & Grub,
which both use a partition table.)