[Sussex] Label and partition external hard drive

[Steven Dobson]

Hi again, Fay

Missed this question in my previous reply.

On 23/02/11 18:26, 'Fay Zee' wrote:
> $ man cfdisk has a note about zeroing the first 512 bytes. When and
> why does this apply?

My man page on cfdisk explains all:

DOS 6.x WARNING
 The DOS 6.x FORMAT command looks for some information in the first sec‐
 tor of the data area of the partition, and treats this  information  as
 more  reliable than the information in the partition table.  DOS FORMAT
 expects DOS FDISK to clear the first 512 bytes of the data  area  of  a
 partition  whenever a size change occurs.  DOS FORMAT will look at this
 extra information even if the /U flag is given -- we  consider  this  a
 bug in DOS FORMAT and DOS FDISK.

 The  bottom  line is that if you use cfdisk or fdisk to change the size
 of a DOS partition table entry, then you must also use dd to  zero  the
 first 512 bytes of that partition before using DOS FORMAT to format the
 partition.  For example, if you were using cfdisk to make a DOS  parti‐
 tion table entry for /dev/hda1, then (after exiting fdisk or cfdisk and
 rebooting Linux so that the partition table information is  valid)  you
 would  use the command "dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda1 bs=512 count=1" to
 zero the first 512 bytes of the partition. Note:

 BE EXTREMELY CAREFUL if you use the dd command, since a small typo  can
 make all of the data on your disk useless.

 For  best results, you should always use an OS-specific partition table
 program.  For example, you should make  DOS  partitions  with  the  DOS
 FDISK program and Linux partitions with the Linux fdisk or Linux cfdisk
 program.

So if the NTFS partition is to be shared with XP then you should really
format it on the XP system.

Steve
-- 
Steve "Dobbo" Dobson