Is it possible to partition a harddisk without using LVM?

[Mohammad Jeffry]

Is it possible? Or is there a tool equivalent to GNU/Linux fdisk?

[Arunvijai_4]

Hi Mohammad,

Only other way is to use VxVM instead of LVM. I dont think fdisk and other utilities are supported.

-Arun

[Sivakumar TS]

Hi,

YES. It is possible.

there is an option to select th whole disk approach, ie witout LVM during installation.

Regards,

Siva

[Vladimir Fabecic]

No, there is no way to partition disks.
It is not supported in HP-UX.

[Vladimir Fabecic · Accepted solution]

Let me be more specific:
HP-UX supports "whole disk approach" which means you use whole disk, from begining to end, without partitioning.
HP-UX does NOT have disk labeling feature!
For example, TRU64 unix and linux have disk labeling feature, you can partition disk (you must do it), but not HP-UX.

[Mohammad Jeffry]

No wonder I can't find/google any howto to do it. Tq guys

[Bill Hassell]

It should be noted that LVM is the simplest (and extremely reliable) method to partition disks inj HP-UX. VxVM is an alternate volume manager (partitioning method) which has a lot more options (more complex). VxVM is from Veritas while LVM has it's roots in IBM, and you'll find LVM available on many distros for Linux.

NOTE: While HP-UX can use whole-disk layouts (no LVM or VxVM), it is not recommended as many utilities like Ignite/UX may not handle the layout correctly. It's probably OK for data disks, but as most sysadmins will tell you, today's disks are just too big for some of the uses and by putting several directories on a single disk can mean a single program can accidently fill the disk and take down everything using that particular disk. With a paritioning system, you can separate particularly vulnerable directories into their own partition.

For instance, /var is VERY critical for Unix systems, with many different usages including daemons from the kernel. An accidental (or purposeful) email swarm could fill /var by sending thousands of megs of email to the system. But if /var/mail is a separate volume, once iot fills, sendmail stops and the rest of the system continues without a problem.