Posted by: Anonymous Coward
on November 29, 2006 12:57 AM
Partition Magic has in the past never been able to read the partition table on my system - despite both Linux and Windows running fine on the hard drive in question for years. And it's long been known that you should never try to set up a Linux partition with it - it simply doesn't know what it's doing.
Yesterday I was formatting a partition as ext2 on an old Compaq Deskpro 4000 with the GParted LiveCD. After reporting the job completed, a subsequent look showed the entire partition table on that drive was trashed (which fortunately didn't matter as I was reinstalling a clean system anyway). That turned out to be a problem - long known, and I should have known better - with the Compaq BIOS not supporting DMA under Linux. Withut the kernel command "ide=nodma" Linux later than Red Hat 7.0 has never been able to be installed on that system (with that parameter, I now have Slackware 10.2 running happily on it.) Although the problem was not GParted per se, the fact remains that GParted was oblivious to problems while it was allegedly doing its job.
If you want a partition manager that works, try BootITNG. Unfortunately it is not free. However, if you don't install it and just run it from the boot diskette or boot CD, it works fine as a partition manager.
What appalls me is that six years into the 21st Century, programmers STILL cannot get a lousy 512 clearly defined bytes to be properly handled. This is just a pathetic commentary on the state of the industry.
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GParted AND Partition Magic Are Both Crap
Posted by: Anonymous Coward on November 29, 2006 12:57 AMYesterday I was formatting a partition as ext2 on an old Compaq Deskpro 4000 with the GParted LiveCD. After reporting the job completed, a subsequent look showed the entire partition table on that drive was trashed (which fortunately didn't matter as I was reinstalling a clean system anyway). That turned out to be a problem - long known, and I should have known better - with the Compaq BIOS not supporting DMA under Linux. Withut the kernel command "ide=nodma" Linux later than Red Hat 7.0 has never been able to be installed on that system (with that parameter, I now have Slackware 10.2 running happily on it.) Although the problem was not GParted per se, the fact remains that GParted was oblivious to problems while it was allegedly doing its job.
If you want a partition manager that works, try BootITNG. Unfortunately it is not free. However, if you don't install it and just run it from the boot diskette or boot CD, it works fine as a partition manager.
What appalls me is that six years into the 21st Century, programmers STILL cannot get a lousy 512 clearly defined bytes to be properly handled. This is just a pathetic commentary on the state of the industry.
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