AWS EC2 /dev/nvme1n1 mounted without partition table

Question

I have an EC2 server on nitro system (c6g.2xl) where I have attached a 2nd volume. This is a web hosting environment and the disk is regularly increased in size.

For some reason I accidentally mounted the disk on - what I would call - the "partition table level", ie. my mount point is /dev/nvme1n1, not /dev/nvme1n1p1 - I can't recall how this happened, but it has the following effects:

• when I make the disk bigger, it is immediately bigger - I do not need to grow the partition table. In fact when I try growpart as per https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/recognize-expanded-volume-linux.html I get an error:

  sfdisk: /dev/nvme1n1: does not contain a recognized partition table
  FAILED: failed to dump sfdisk info for /dev/nvme1n1
  

• I have successfully restored from a snapshot by attaching it as a 3rd disk

Given that seemingly all of the Internet has a partition table on this volume - what are the downsides of this approach?

Answer 1

There is no need for a partition table on a data disk, it's only necessary if you want to boot from it. If you want to split a volume into smaller block devices, I'd suggest using LVM.

Answer 2

try this:

XFS:

sudo xfs_growfs -d /data 

ext4:

sudo resize2fs /dev/nvme1n1