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Marco Shaw
Asked: 2020-12-19 07:30:03 +0800 CST

No partition table required?

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I was surprised to find two of my environments had different setups. One has a DOS partition style, while the other does not appear to have any kind of table defined whatsoever.

I'm sort of familiar with the concept where Oracle, for example, sits on a raw disk, is that the same here? Can XFS simply sit on a raw disk with no partition table?

For example, this disk has a fully working XFS FS. I've been able to resize it, etc. over the last few years.

# fdisk -l /dev/sdc

Disk /dev/sdc: 644.2 GB, 644245094400 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 78325 cylinders, total 1258291200 sectors
Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x08020000

Disk /dev/sdc doesn't contain a valid partition table
xfs

1 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    You don't need a partition table to write data to a storage device. Partition tables indicate that the disk is used for something, so that it is probably a good practice to partition disks (or LUNs), but it is by no means mandatory.

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