From: dwhodgins@nomail.afraid.org   
      
   On Thu, 07 Jun 2012 12:49:36 -0400, Adam  wrote:   
      
   > think I'll stick with cfdisk for creating partitions, as it does basic   
   > sanity checks.  I gather sfdisk will let root do anything, even stupid   
   > things.   
      
   That's correct. :-)  I recommend using gparted or diskdrake, as they will   
   now default to allocating partitions on 1MB boundaries, which ensures the   
   partitions align to the write size for 4k sector drives, and the various   
   erase block sizes used for flash devices, such as ssd drives.   
      
   > Not cfdisk, which is what I was drawing my conclusions from.  It   
   > renumbers logical partitions consecutively, regardless of the order they   
   > were created in.  The one closest to the start of the disk is always   
   > sd?5, and existing logical partitions are sd?6, sd?7, etc. in their   
   > physical order.  If I created a new logical partition before sd?5,   
   > everything would get renumbered and I'd have to alter any /etc/fstab   
   > references to /dev/sd?5 and higher.   
      
   Yes, I forgot about cfdisk, as I haven't used it in years.  It does that   
   for better compatibility with the fdisk program from dos, which also did   
   that.   
      
   > I did notice one thing strange regarding sda3:   
   > 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.  Would you have any idea   
   > what's going on here?  Is it worth doing anything about, since   
   > everything's working correctly so far?   
      
   When you run mkfs.????, all it does is format the filesystem inside of   
   the partition.  It doesn't alter the partition table.   
      
   You could fix it with sfdisk, but I wouldn't bother.  As it's on a hard   
   drive, there shouldn't be any problem.  If it were on a removable drive,   
   I'd be inclined to fix it, as windows will sometimes "fix" things, it   
   sees as being incorrect, simply by booting into windows with the drive   
   connected.  It doesn't give you any warning, or let you know it's done   
   that.  You only find out when you can't access the data.   
      
   I once was experimenting with lvm, I created a lvm physical volume on   
   /dev/sdd (a usb stick).  Note that it was on the device, not on a   
   partition in the device, so there was no partition table in the mbr.   
   I rebooted into xp, with the device plugged in, and xp happily overwrote   
   the first sector with a standard mbr.  Real pain to fix.   
      
   Regards, Dave Hodgins   
      
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