Accessing partitions in drive images

[Ben Scott]

On Sun, Jan 29, 2012 at 12:45 PM, Joshua Judson Rosen
<rozzin at geekspace.com> wrote:
> I've always wondered: why do the little USB flash sticks,
> SD cards, etc. all include a partition-table with one
> partition? Why don't they just use whole-device filesystems?

  Because they're not floppy disks, and fixed disks are assumed to
have a partition table.

  The design of the IBM-PC (I use the term "design" loosely) assumes
two types of disks: Floppy disks and fixed disks.  Floppy disks are
generally assumed to be of the few well-known types.  Fixed disks can
vary and one is expected to inquire as to the size.  Flash drives
wouldn't work as floppies, so they're treated as fixed disks.

  There's nothing insurmountable that keeps one from just putting a
filesystem on a USB flash drive.  Indeed, you can do it, and Linux
software will generally be just fine.  But it breaks a lot of
assumptions that could screw up BIOSes and other OSes, and/or lead to
those same things trying to write a partition table into your
filesystem.  And since your flash drive is technically laid out in a
non-standard manner (again, I use the term "standard" loosely), it
would arguably not be their fault.

  Next up: Why are console windows traditionally 80 columns wide?

-- Ben