Date: Sun, 31 Jul 2005 07:16:02 -0700 From: garys@opusnet.com (Gary W. Swearingen) To: Glenn Dawson <glenn@antimatter.net> Cc: Nikolas Britton <nikolas.britton@gmail.com>, FreeBSD - Questions <freebsd-questions@freebsd.org> Subject: Re: Using a hard drive without partitions Message-ID: <f77jf783j1.jf7@mail.opusnet.com> In-Reply-To: <6.1.0.6.2.20050730185922.0670be10@cobalt.antimatter.net> (Glenn Dawson's message of "Sat, 30 Jul 2005 19:08:32 -0700") References: <ef10de9a050730012642c200b6@mail.gmail.com> <4kbr4k9x6z.r4k@mail.opusnet.com> <ef10de9a050730105851978a63@mail.gmail.com> <6.1.0.6.2.20050730185922.0670be10@cobalt.antimatter.net>
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Glenn Dawson <glenn@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.)
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