[Cialug] Don't do this...

[David Champion]

Found a server today where someone had done this:

mkfs -t ext3 /dev/sdb

(among other bad things, like not putting the mount in /etc/fstab)

Just about gave the poor owner a heart attack when he rebooted the server,
and none of his data was there.

When you do a fdisk -l, it says that sdb doesn't have any valid partitions,
but you can still mount /dev/sdb. Normally one would have created the
partition on /dev/sdb1.

Here's a forum post about someone else having this problem.

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/linux-hardware-18/not-valid-partition-table-393042/

-dc