Disk /dev/hde doesn't contain a valid partition table {Scanned}

[C. Linus Hicks]

On Tue, 2004-09-07 at 18:06, Mike Burger wrote:
> On Tue, 7 Sep 2004, SW wrote:
> 
> > C. Linus Hicks,
> > 
> > Thanks for the info. I'm trying to figure out if I formated the entire drive
> > (200 gigs) using fdisk and then created a ext3 partition, it should be
> > mounted as /dev/hde or /dev/hde1?
> > 
> > Can the drive be usable even though there are no partitions? fdisk says
> > there is no partition on the drive but I can use it just fine: read, write,
> > delelte, change directories, etc without any problems.
> 
> Generally speaking, it's probably safer to create a 200GB partition on the 
> drive (which would be /dev/hde1), and then use "mkfs.ext3 /dev/hde1" to 
> actually format the partition in question.  You would then mount /dev/hde1 
> to whichever mountpoint it is you wanted.

I would guess that what happened is that you used fdisk to create
partitions, and then did:

mke2fs -j /dev/hde

Rather than:

mke2fs -j /dev/hde1

This would have overwritten your partition table and created a
filesystem the size of the disk. This is perfectly legal to do, but
probably not what you wanted.

In order to fix your original problem where the backup script complains
about there being no partition table (assuming you want a partition
table on this disk, which generally you do), you will have to copy your
data somewhere else, use fdisk to partition the disk again, use mke2fs
to create filesystems in those partition<,s>, then copy your data back.
This time be sure to use hde1, hde2, hde3, etc. when making filesystems
and you will be set. Also, you will have to change the entry in your
fstab.
-- 
C. Linus Hicks <lhicks at nc.rr.com>