Recently I have had some issues with my bochs drive images and had trouble mounting them so I could read the partitions inside the disks. Needless to say I was able to get everything worked out but it got me thinking of why we use this whole partition scheme anyway, especially on devices that we plan to make the partition the entire device anyway....

I mean cd roms and floppys do not have any need to contain partitions yet they are mounted and used just fine. So I ran a bit of a test just to see if it was possible to format an entire device that you normally wouldn't. I used a removable usb thumb drive and apart from a warning that I was going to put a file system on the entire device it allowed me to format it just fine. I was able to transfer data and mount unmount add and remove the device from the machine just fine.

What I am wondering is if there is some kind of problem doing this? I don't currently have another system to test it out on, at least non windows, so I am not sure if it causes any problems. Futhermore is it possible to format your entire operating system drive in this way and would boot loaders even allow it?

One of the reasons I think it would be better to do this is that you can make images of file systems and mount them with loopback anyway so what danger would there be in just making a home partition and mounting it via loopback during start up. This would allow you to back it up alot easier as well and even give you the option to encrypt the contents. Other then the swap partition which can be put into a file, and of course compatibility issues with windows I see no reason to partition a drive.

Some questions that I have is
1. Is there any dangers like data loss that can occur using this methood at least more then the tradional methood?
2. Do you get more disk space this way even minuscule amounts.
3. Does it improve or hinder performance.
4. Would SSD drives actually benefit from this scheme as to not require alignment?

1. No

2. 512 bytes

3. No