<html><body>$ man cfdisk has a note about zeroing the first 512 bytes. When and why does this apply?<br /><br />When I first ran # cfdisk /dev/sdf on the new disk I saved the intitial printout:<br />(I don't know what the asterisks signify.)<br /><br /> Name Flags Part Type FS Type [Label] Size (MB)<br /> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------<br /> Pri/Log Free Space 1.05 *<br /> sdf1 Primary NTFS [^R] 159996.97 *<br /> Pri/Log Free Space 0.13 *<br /><br />which showed there was 1.05MB of free space before the first partition, which happens to be marked as NTFS.<br /><br />I didn't notice that when I deleted the partitions, so I just created my first partition right at the beginning, gave it the label "XP" and then ran # mkntfs -L "XP" "/dev/sdf1" to build the NTFS file system. It took exactly 25 minutes.<br /><br />The new printout is:<br /><br /> Name Flags Part Type FS Type [Label] Size (MB)<br /> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------<br /> sdf1 Boot Primary NTFS [^E] 49351.68<br /> sdf2 Primary Linux 49351.68<br /> sdf3 Primary Linux 61294.79<br /><br />The other difference is that the first printout showed that none of the partitions were set as bootable, whereas when I tried to write my new partitions to the disk a message told me I needed to set one as bootable.<br /><br />Any advice please?<br /><br /><br />
Best Regards,<br />Fay<br />East Grinstead Linux User Group<br />www.eglug.org.uk<br /><br /></body></html>