Is partitioning required?

[Robert Spanjaard]

On Sun, 12 Jun 2011 15:37:32 +0100, Liam Proven wrote:

>>> Not strictly necessary, but a very good idea nontheless.  It can be
>>> helpful, for example, if you have a boot sector that bootloaders can
>>> install on.  Also, without a partition table, other low level disk
>>> utilities or OS may, at some point, simply overwrite parts of the hard
>>> drive without warning (as they would assume the hd is blank)
>>>
>>>
>> Have a look at it with gparted, and use that to put a partition on it,
>> which will be /dev/sdb1.  Formatting the disk probably just put it into
>> 512 byte blocks.  Before you can write to it, sensibly, you need a file
>> system on it, say ext4, but it could be FAT32, ntfs, ext3 or any other
>> file system recognised by the OS.
> 
> Be careful!
> 
> While this advice is correct, it will erase the disk & you will lose
> everything on it, effectively irretrievably.
> 
> You /can/ use an unpartitioned disk if you wish, as others have said.
> It's just slightly risky, if something decides to try to make it
> bootable or something, tries to manipulate the nonexistent boot record
> or partition table and trashes your filesystem.
> 
> I'd advise copying any data off it, repartitioning as one big primary
> ext4 volume, and then putting its contents back.

Thanks for the information. I'll leave it as it is. It's only used for 
data, and only by myself, and by one OS. And it's backed up daily. So I 
can live with the risks. :-)

-- 
Regards, Robert                                      http://www.arumes.com