/boot/loader question

Michel Talon talon at lpthe.jussieu.fr
Wed Dec 8 14:45:43 PST 2004


walt wrote:

> 
> 
> On Mon, 6 Dec 2004, Simon 'corecode' Schubert wrote:
> 
>> ...i should extend fdisk to also show extended slice information.
> 
> What a great idea!  I notice that NetBSD's fdisk already does that.
> 
> I've also been looking thru the code for the linux fdisk which, IMHO,
> is the best of all.  In addition to listing the extended partition
> without asking, it even lets you edit a BSD disklabel.

I used to think the same, but after some incident where i had to rebuild
my partition table i discovered that linux fdisk is not so great :-(
In particular it will use what he thinks BIOS 's idea of disk geometry,
which may be weird, and doesn't allow to configure that. Go read the man
page of Linux fdisk, and you will discover that Linux people don't
recommend it at all, but recommend cfdisk and sfdisk. In fact there is only
one invariant, FreeBSD fdisk sucks badly. The fdisk embedded in sysinstall
is better. It copes correctly with the geometry problem i mentioned,
is able to compute the correct c/h/s corresponding to your choices without 
requiring a separate calculator like the command line fdisk does ...


-- 
Michel Talon





More information about the Kernel mailing list