[colug-432] go pratitionless

[Rick Troth]

I changed the subject to be a little less rude as I hijack the thread.   :-)

Thanks, Josh, for the tip about testdisk. Meanwhile ...


On 01/26/2014 10:46 PM, Joshua Kramer wrote:
> So I finally got around to putting an SSD in my laptop.  This meant
> that I now have a 640GB hard disk that I could put into an external
> enclosure, so I did so.

Good plan! I have an external magnetic, just one. Could use more. Very
handy! Helped a buddy install OpenSUSE 13 on an external drive a couple
weeks back. (So he did not have to repartition the internal disk and
cause anxiety for his wife.)

> But alas, the partitioning on this 640GB drive was inconvenient.  It
> had a 500MB boot partition, a 550GB /home partition, and 85GB /
> partition.  I wanted to be able to use most of the 650GB as one
> contiguous filesystem.  So, I deleted the third (85GB) partition and
> did the simple fdisk trick of deleting the second partiton and then
> re-creating it with the same beginning cylinder and a different ending
> cylinder.  I did this and wrote the partition table to disk.

Guessing you want to retain some of the existing content. Hoping you
*do* have backups.

Suggestion: make the whole disk one EXT3 (or EXT4) and lose the
partition table. You don't save any appreciable space, but you remove
one layer of admin/config consideration.

> Strangely, it wasn't automounting.  I then tried to mount /dev/sdb2
> and it gave me the dreaded "You must specify filesystem type"
> message.  Drat!  I tried to re-create the exact structure as before
> via fdisk, but that didn't work either.  The problem was that the
> boundaries between partition 1 and partition 2 were not on cylinder
> boundaries... so instead of beginning on sector 26, it began on sector
> 25.5.

Not that partitionless is a silver bullet, but concerns like this go
away. Ahhh...

And the automounter is still happy, mounting by label or by UUID or by
device.

Of course, MS won't know what to do with it. Some consider that a
bonus.   :-)

-- R; <><