This is an ongoing chat between a systems administrator and a applications developer: It is in regards to what is an Amazon S3 'bucket' and how looks like a hard drive in the cloud. As the admin I think that it existence does not give a S3 bucket every attribute of a real physical hard drive. So if I ran the parted command or any other GPT aware utility against the dev files the point to a connected S3 bucket and tried to create a GUID partition table (GPT) and tried to preserve that configuration across the restarting of virtual instances that there would be no guarantees of it persistence. Thoughts? Where in a virtual disk is the structures that store MBR, GPT, Inode structures and reserve areas for bad block data that is contained on a real physical hard drive? regards, David