drives

[Marcel Kunath]

Hello,

had some hard drive goal today I could not achieve. Sometimes I use new
harddrives and don't partition them and put a full file sysstem along the whole
drive. Never had a problem. The drive would show as whole device /dev/hdb

Now today I had a drive I had a partition table on and wanted to wipe and then
use the drive once again without partition table but I couldn't figure out how.
Can this only be done with entirely new drives who never had a partition table?
Is it possible to return drives into this state of operation? I know its anal I
am just surprised that fdisk doesn't allow you to configure a drive as a whole
device.

Have a machine like:

/dev/hda1    /
/dev/hdb     /usr/local/ftp/pub

and try to do something similar on another machine and I am now really curious
about this partition table thing.

Thanks,
 -- Marcel Kunath