From: adam@address.invalid   
      
   David W. Hodgins wrote:   
   > On Thu, 07 Jun 2012 12:49:36 -0400, Adam  wrote:   
      
   > I recommend using gparted or diskdrake, as they will   
   > now default to allocating partitions on 1MB boundaries   
      
   Thanks, Dave!  I hadn't thought of using a GUI tool for partitioning,   
   but I can see where that feature would give them an advantage.  One   
   thing I do know about partitioning is that a little time planning   
   beforehand can save a lot of aggravation (and repartitioning) later on!   
      
   >> As shipped, sda1 was most of the internal HD (Windows Vista, NTFS) and   
   >> sda3 was the last ~14 GB, the NTFS Windows recovery partition.  IIRC   
   >> sda2 wasn't used.  A few weeks ago, I used "mke2fs -ccvj -t ext3   
   >> /dev/sda3" to reformat sda3 as ext3 (for user data common across all   
   >> distros).  I have no problem using it as an ext3 partition, and df   
   >> identifies it as ext3.  However, the Mandriva 2010.0 versions of fdisk,   
   >> cfdisk, and sfdisk all report it as HPFS/NTFS.   
   >   
   > When you run mkfs.????, all it does is format the filesystem inside of   
   > the partition.  It doesn't alter the partition table.   
      
   I'd expect it to, but obviously it doesn't need to.   
      
   > You could fix it with sfdisk, but I wouldn't bother.  As it's on a hard   
   > drive, there shouldn't be any problem.   
      
   Strangely enough, around the same time I also used cfdisk to delete sda1   
   (NTFS) and then put sda1 and sda4 (both ext4) in that space, and all the   
   programs report both of those as Linux ext2/3/4 or similar.   
      
   > I rebooted into xp, with the device plugged in, and xp happily overwrote   
   > the first sector with a standard mbr.  Real pain to fix.   
      
   I don't do this for removable devices, but for my two HDs I periodically   
   do something like:   
      
   [adam@eris accounts]$ for L in a b ; do for N in '' 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 ;   
   do sudo dd if=/dev/sd$L$N of=sd$L$N bs=512 count=1 ; done ; done   
      
   which has made recovery from a mangled MBR or partition boot record much   
   simpler.   
      
   Adam   
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