What he is talking about here is creating links for digital camera that is accessed using usb_storage, and so looks like a SCSI drive to the system. He is saying that he would not want to run fdisk on this device, so he would not need /dev/sda, just /dev/sda1. I don't know what would happen if you tried to repartition a digital camera mounted this way, and apparently the author didn't know ether, and didn't want to find out.
One thing this newbie read somewhere is that /dev/sda? are not formatable ?? Can someone clarify this ?
Ah... here it is:
A key such as KERNEL="sd?1" would match KERNEL names such as "sda1", "sdb1", "sdc1", and equally importantly, it will not match KERNEL names such as sda, sdb, or sg1. The purpose of this key is to ignore the /dev/sda and /dev/sg1 nodes. The device is a digital camera -* I would not dream of fdisking it or anything like that, so these 2 nodes are pretty useless to me.* The key attempts to capture the /dev/sda1 node, which is mountable and therefore useful!
Reverse in you case maybe?
This is within this link
http://www.reactivated.net/udevrules.php
He is also talking about what happens if your rules do not create all possible device names for a drive, and you use fdisk to create new partitions. You may not be able to access the new partitions without removing the device, and re-attaching it, or rebooting.
One other point, you normally do not mount the entire drive when using hard drives - you mount the partitions. But you run fdisk on the entire drive. (Well, you could run fdisk on a partition, but why?) So, you run fdisk on /dev/sda to create/change/delete partitions. But you would mount /dev/sda1.
I don't know if I should bring this point up, but you could, if you really wanted to, use /dev/sda in place of /dev/sda1 to create/mount a file system that would be the entire drive. It is not really a good idea, but it can be done. Some of the tools will complain about the missing partition table, but you don't have to have one.
Mikkel --
Do not meddle in the affairs of dragons, for you are crunchy and taste good with Ketchup!
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