On Wed, 2009-08-12 at 03:15 -0700, Alan Evans wrote:
> So I tried your suggested of writing zeros over the beginning of the
> drive, not very hopeful. But it worked! The install proceeded without
> a hitch and the PC booted the installed OS. (Add fanfare.)
>
> However, now that the system is running, fdisk reports:
>
> Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
> /dev/sda1 * 1 26 204800 83 Linux
> Partition 1 does not end on cylinder boundary.
That's a common thing, and doesn't usually matter. It can be a problem
if you use different partitioning programs on the same drive, though.
It's usually not a good thing to do, for various reasons, and it might
be the problem that you're having (previously Macintosh partitioned,
later Linux modified, but not cleanly).
> So I'm still confused about the disagreement between fdisk and
> anaconda regarding how to lay down a partition table. Being an
> old-school kind of guy, I'm inclined to believe fdisk, but I don't
> really know how to confirm it one way or the other.
I seem to recall reading a few reports that denigrated fdisk for not
being as good as it should be, that being about how it does its job, nor
the user interface that we work with. I also seem to recall that cfdisk
was supposed to be better, but I've never tried it.
Read the fdisk man file, this is from the end of it:
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 par-
tition 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 par-
tition 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 nonin-
teractively.)
These days there also is parted. The cfdisk interface is nicer, but
parted does much more: it not only resizes partitions, but also the
filesystems that live in them.
I get the impression that we use fdisk from force of habit, rather than
other reasons.
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