[Sussex] Label and partition external hard drive

[Stephen Williams]

On Wed, 2011-02-23 at 20:02 +0000, Steven Dobson wrote:
> Hi Fay
> 
> On 23/02/11 19:31, 'Fay Zee' wrote:
> > But what about the issue of the original partition table having 1.5MB
> > of free space at the beginning and my new table not having this?
> > Was that a red herring?
> 
> I've seen this myself.  I have no idea why they are done that way.

I suspect this may have been some form of provision for recovery or
system utilities (the latter given the amount of space allocated) that
are often present on disks installed in new PCs. Dell and HP do this,
and I suspect others do too. These partitions are often labelled in a
way that makes them invisible to dos/windows systems.

If you are using the disk from scratch for a new Linux system it's
probably safe to allocate this space for your own purposes.

> 
> > This disk was acquired through eBay and sold as a reformatted disk by
> > someone who seems to sell quite a few.
> 
> I don't put a great deal of trust in because they sell a lot of stuff.
> That makes them good sales people, not good geeks.
> 
> I also expect that most of these people use Windows.  Well I know a
> mounted partition shows up on Window (normally as a drive letter, but I
> think there are other ways now).  But how are unmounted partitions
> found?  That I have no idea.

Normally this is done through Disk Manager for non-dos Windows based
systems.

> 
> On *nix it is easy.  There will be an entry in /dev somewhere.  But I
> think the real factor is that Linux and the *BSDs are open.  As a
> results the tools are free and therefore the best tools can rise to the
> top of the tool chain.
> 
> This thread is a good example.  You're using cfdisk.  I would recommend
> it to anyone as the first partition tool to try.  But there is also
> fdisk.  It does the same job, but I find cfdisk easier to use, but there
> are times when cfdisk doesn't work but fdisk does, so I'm glad that both
> are there.
> 
> What is the best partition tool on Windows?  I don't mean the most
> common, I mean the easiest, simplest, most reliable.  There are probably
> quite a number out there.  But in the commercial environment money
> talks.  So if the best tool also cost money then not everyone will own
> it and so magazines and blogs will use the one provided by the OS,
> substandard thou it might be, because that is the one everyone will have.

If you can plug the disk into an existing windows system the easiest way
is to use Disk Manager.

Personally I'd stick to cfdisk or fdisk on linux systems though, as
recommended by Mr. Dobson.

> 
> I seam to have jumped on my soap box again!  :-)
> 
> Steve

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