On Mon, 2006-07-10 at 17:09 +0300, itayf@nospammail.net wrote:
[root@frodo ~]# sfdisk -l /dev/sdc
<snip>
Disk /dev/sda: 30401 cylinders, 255 heads, 63 sectors/track Units = cylinders of 8225280 bytes, blocks of 1024 bytes, counting from 0
Device Boot Start End #cyls #blocks Id System/dev/sda1 * 0+ 12 13- 104391 83 Linux /dev/sda2 13 30400 30388 244091610 8e Linux LVM /dev/sda3 0 - 0 0 0 Empty /dev/sda4 0 - 0 0 0 Empty Warning: start=63 - this looks like a partition rather than the entire disk. Using fdisk on it is probably meaningless. [Use the --force option if you really want this]
<snip>
BTW: I wanted to mention for folks that may not know. If your disk is not to be booted, you can *choose* to not partition it, with little concern. Further, even bootable HDs need not be partitioned.
Since a "cylinder" (in the typical LBA world) is 8MB, you may want to gain that 8MB, if you are really tight about things. You can avoid partitioning altogether or you can start your first partition right after the disk label (MBR) or on the track following. Long ago and far away, this used to have performance implications. No more.
But be careful and know what else you are using that may affect you. Some MS stuff uses extra blocks; I also hear that some HD-related software uses "assumed" free space in the first cylinder, etc.
But if you do just Linux, you *can* skip the partitions. Even with LVM. Or start right after the MBR (disk label).
Be sure you consider various fall-back processes for "less than disaster" recovery. Partitions might still be useful on one or more of your HDs to have backup boot partitions, finer-grained LVM PV allocations, etc.
As with writing ext2 instead of ISO file systems to CD, it can be useful but be sure you don't thoughtlessly give up useful compatibility or transportability.