Bug#181975: di-utils-mkfs: failure with unpartitioned hard drive

[John Summerfield <debian@computerdatasafe.com.au>]

On Sat, 22 Feb 2003, Oskar Liljeblad wrote:

> On Friday, February 21, 2003 at 15:00, Matt Kraai wrote:
> > 
> > > The fix is either to tell the user that there are no partitions,
> > > or (IMHO the preferred way for experts) allow the user to create
> > > a file system on the whole disk. Theoretical (untested) fix
> > > below.
> > 
> > Why would you prefer not to partition the drive?
> 
> IMHO the PC partition table format is obscure and a remnant of
> the past. If you plan on using all of the hard drive space for
> storage you won't need partitions either. I've been using
> several secondary hard drives (for storage only) without
> partition tables for quite some time now.
> 
> Seriously though, is this idea stupid?

I think it reasonable for removable media such as MO disks; the format is
called "superfloppy." For regular fixed disks, I think it more likely than not
to cause confusion, and any saving of disk space is hardly significant.


> Am I the only one who does this?
> 
> I don't know if it is possible to boot from a hard drive without
> a partition table on PC platforms. If there isn't there is no
> point whatsoever in allowing users to install debian on
> a hard drive without partitions.

I have installed LILO in both MBR and partitions, sometimes on the same system.
It works well, and I expect GRUB to do so too. I think if a superfloppy formt
disk doesn't boot, a bug report is in order.

OTOH the maintainer might respond, "unsupported.";-}


-- 
Cheers
John Summerfield