On Thu, Dec 11, 2008 at 10:07:00AM +0900, John Summerfield wrote:
> >>Everything seems to work as expected, except that the 750GB drive is
> >>somehow getting mounted on the device, rather than on a partition: ...
> ...
> >>There IS a partition on the drive:
> >>But my attempt to mount the drive on sdc1 results in:
> >>    # mount -t ext3 /dev/sdc1 /local3
> >>    mount: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/sdc1,
> >>           missing codepage or helper program, or other error
> >>           In some cases useful info is found in syslog - try
> >>           dmesg | tail  or so
> >>
> >>I don't really understand what's going on here or how the system got
> >>into this peculiar configuration.


Perhaps you understand the situation exactly:

1) the disk has a partition table
2) mkfs and mount was done on the "whole device"
3) mount of "whole device" works
4) mount of "partition" does not work (because mkfs
   was done on the whole disk).

There is nothing especially wrong with using filesystems
on "whole disk" devices and I would not go to great length
to "fix" it.

However, traditionally, hard disks are used with partitions
and some tools and utilities may be confused by the "whole
disk" layouts.

But this is only a traditional convention, not a universal rule,
for example /dev/md "software raid" devices are usually used
without partitions.


-- 
Konstantin Olchanski
Data Acquisition Systems: The Bytes Must Flow!
Email: olchansk-at-triumf-dot-ca
Snail mail: 4004 Wesbrook Mall, TRIUMF, Vancouver, B.C., V6T 2A3, Canada