Posted by: Anonymous Coward
on December 01, 2006 04:54 AM
About the Compaq Deskpro: I'm using one (still! Longish story...), and that's really helpful.
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Some time back, I got horribly bitten by DiskDrake, when it was still called Mandrake. I had used Part. Magic (V.7, iirc) to configure my HD, and tried to install Mandrake Linux on an HD that had Win and FAT32 archives. Skipping lots of very-ugly details (totally trashed partition table, and Win totalled), I finally concluded that Part. Magic is conservative about where it begins a new partition. It apparently goes to the next free cylinder, ignoring any unallocated sectors on the last allocated cylinder.
However, back then, DiskDrake apparently began a partition on the next free sector, and rewrote the whole partition table accordingly. I've seen precious little in print or online about this lack of a standard (afaik!) for where/how partition starts are to be placed.
I'd say it's quite risky to use more than one partition manager to write the partition table. One conservative IT pro. never puts two OSes on the same drive; for him, it's one OS per "spindle", to use his term (maybe from the days of removable disk packs?)
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Re:GParted AND Partition Magic Are Both Crap
Posted by: Anonymous Coward on December 01, 2006 04:54 AM=+=
Some time back, I got horribly bitten by DiskDrake, when it was still called Mandrake. I had used Part. Magic (V.7, iirc) to configure my HD, and tried to install Mandrake Linux on an HD that had Win and FAT32 archives. Skipping lots of very-ugly details (totally trashed partition table, and Win totalled), I finally concluded that Part. Magic is conservative about where it begins a new partition. It apparently goes to the next free cylinder, ignoring any unallocated sectors on the last allocated cylinder.
However, back then, DiskDrake apparently began a partition on the next free sector, and rewrote the whole partition table accordingly. I've seen precious little in print or online about this lack of a standard (afaik!) for where/how partition starts are to be placed.
I'd say it's quite risky to use more than one partition manager to write the partition table. One conservative IT pro. never puts two OSes on the same drive; for him, it's one OS per "spindle", to use his term (maybe from the days of removable disk packs?)
nbodley }att[ theworld )dott[ com
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