[CLUE-Tech] drive formatting

[Dave Anselmi]

Matt Gushee wrote:

> I recently read somewhere -- may have been the Debian Guide -- that
> cfdisk is recommended over fdisk. Apparently in a few cases fdisk gets
> partition boundaries wrong, whereas cfdisk doesn't. I wouldn't be too
> scared about that ... I've been using Linux fdisk for 5 years and have
> never had problems with it, nor has anybody I know (except for those
> horrible failing-to-think kind of problems). But I thought it was
> worth mentioning.

The fdisk man page says that cfdisk makes high quality partition tables.
I infer that it has to do with partitions ending on cylinder boundaries,
which DOS requires but Linux doesn't.  cfdisk is more helpful trying to
make something that works with DOS.  Don't know if that matters any more.

One thing that confused me at first with cfdisk is that it won't show you
an extended partition if you have one, just the logical partitions.  So it
might show you hda1, hda5, hda6 while fdisk shows hda1, hda2, hda5, hda6.
No big deal, just be aware of what is happening if you use both.

Dave