Is partitioning required?

[Robert Spanjaard]

On Sun, 12 Jun 2011 15:32:31 +0100, Tony Pursell wrote:

>> Not strictly necessary, but a very good idea nontheless.  It can be
>> helpful, for example, if you have a boot sector that bootloaders can
>> install on.  Also, without a partition table, other low level disk
>> utilities or OS may, at some point, simply overwrite parts of the hard
>> drive without warning (as they would assume the hd is blank)
> 
> Have a look at it with gparted, and use that to put a partition on it,
> which will be /dev/sdb1.  Formatting the disk probably just put it into
> 512 byte blocks.  Before you can write to it, sensibly, you need a file
> system on it, say ext4, but it could be FAT32, ntfs, ext3 or any other
> file system recognised by the OS.

It does have an ext3 file system. I don't think you can format a drive 
without setting up a file system.

Here's a screenshot of Disk Utility, with the drive formatted:
http://www.arumes.com/temp/du.png

-- 
Regards, Robert                                      http://www.arumes.com