[Sussex] Label and partition external hard drive

['Fay Zee']

$ man cfdisk has a note about zeroing the first 512 bytes. When and
why does this apply?

When I first ran # cfdisk /dev/sdf on the new disk I saved the
intitial printout:
(I don't know what the asterisks signify.)

    Name          Flags        Part Type    FS
Type            [Label]           Size (MB)
 -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
                               
Pri/Log     Free
Space                               
1.05  *
    sdf1                       
Primary     NTFS              
[^R]              159996.97  *
                               
Pri/Log     Free
Space                               
0.13  *

which showed there was 1.05MB of free space before the first
partition, which happens to be marked as NTFS.

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.

The new printout is:

   Name          Flags        Part Type    FS
Type            [Label]           Size (MB)
 -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
    sdf1          Boot          Primary    
NTFS               [^E]              
49351.68
    sdf2                       
Primary    
Linux                                
49351.68
    sdf3                       
Primary    
Linux                                
61294.79

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.

Any advice please?

 Best Regards,
Fay
East Grinstead Linux User Group
www.eglug.org.uk


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