I was surprised to find two of my environments had different setups. One has a DOS partition style, while the other does not appear to have any kind of table defined whatsoever.
I'm sort of familiar with the concept where Oracle, for example, sits on a raw disk, is that the same here? Can XFS simply sit on a raw disk with no partition table?
For example, this disk has a fully working XFS FS. I've been able to resize it, etc. over the last few years.
# fdisk -l /dev/sdc
Disk /dev/sdc: 644.2 GB, 644245094400 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 78325 cylinders, total 1258291200 sectors
Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x08020000
Disk /dev/sdc doesn't contain a valid partition table