On Tue, Feb 9, 2010 at 9:09 AM, Frank Steinmetzger <war...@gmx.de> wrote:
<SNIP>
> So sdb7 now ends at sector 976703935. Interestingly, I couldn’t use the
> immediate next sector for sdb8:
> start for sdb8 response by fdisk
> 976703936 sector already allocated
> 976703944 Value out of range. First sector... (default 976703999):
>
> The first one fdisk offered me was exactly 64 sectors behind the end sector of
> sdb7 (976703999), which would leave a space of those mysterious 62 “empty”
> sectors in between. So I used 976704000, which is divisable by 64 again,
> though it’s not that relevant for a partition of 31 MB. :D
<SNIP>
Again, this is probably unrelated to anything going on in this thread
but I started wondering this morning if maybe fdisk could take a step
forward with these newer disk technologies and build in some smarts
about where to put partition boundaries. I.e. - if I'm using a 4K
block size disk why not have fdisk do things better?
My first thought was to look at the man page for fdisk and see who the
author was. I did not find any email addresses. However I did find
some very interesting comments about partitioning disks in the bugs
section, quoted below.
I don't think I need what the 'bugs' author perceives as the
advantages of fdisk so I think I'll try to focus a bit more on cfdisk.
Interestingly cfdisk was the tool Willie pointed out when he kindly
took the time to educate me on what was going on physically.
- Mark
[QUOTE]
BUGS
There are several *fdisk programs around. Each has its
problems and strengths. Try
them in the order cfdisk, fdisk, sfdisk. (Indeed, cfdisk is a
beautiful program that
has strict requirements on the partition tables it accepts, and
produces high quality
partition tables. Use it if you can. fdisk is a buggy program
that does fuzzy things
- usually it happens to produce reasonable results. Its
single advantage is that it
has some support for BSD disk labels and other non-DOS
partition tables. Avoid it if
you can. sfdisk is for hackers only - the user interface is
terrible, but it is more
correct than fdisk and more powerful than both fdisk and
cfdisk. Moreover, it can be
used noninteractively.)
[/QUOTE]
