Using a hard drive without partitions

[Gary W. Swearingen]

Nikolas Britton <nikolas.britton at gmail.com> writes:

> Drive:
>   Dangerously dedicated
>   /dev/da0s1
>   newfs -O2 -U

I think you're using "dangerously dedicated" wrongly. A DD disk is one
which has no standard partition table in the MBR; the "disklabel"
sectors (16) start at sector 0 (or with your no-secondary-partitions-
either method, your filesystem would start there (newfs /dev/da0)).

You've got a standard partition table with the s1 entry in use, which
is not "dangerous".  The FAQ has an entry on DD disks.

I can't say much about your main question; I've never heard of doing
it.  It sounds less "dangerous" than putting a FS in a file, like
we do with ISO filesystems all the time.