[Novalug] partitioners (was Upgrading with LVM)

James Ewing Cottrell III JECottrell3@Comcast.NET
Tue Aug 26 00:41:50 EDT 2014


Why? Because I want things done *my* way. Borrowing a trick from my old 
(pseudo-)nemesis Bryan J Smith, I want set my geometry to -H64 -S32 so 
that 1 Cylinder is exactly 1M. My partitions are always multiples of 
1000 Cylinders so I can remember them and read them by inspection. I 
don't want to see fugly numbers like having a partition beginning at 
Cylinder 15387 and containing 473925 blocks. Who can read that?

Because fdisk never changes, and I know exactly what I am doing and can 
do it quickly. Now clearly gparted is necessary for disks greater than 
2T, and I have made my peace with that, or at least a subset of its 
commands. But it's really a very Horrid program; incomplete, poorly 
documented, and with things in it that have no business being there.

Because there are way too many partitioners out there at installation 
time, and who wants to master or fight with them all? The useful ones 
keep getting tinkered with until they force you down a path of their own 
choosing, restricting *my* choices, or making them difficult.

When you are sitting around debugging kickstart files, cutting the mkfs 
step out of the process saves lots of time; I just put the logic in the 
%pre script.

And finally, if you do your own partitioning, you learn something, and 
are master of that.

And yes, Partition Magic was truly a program worth paying for.

JIM

On 8/25/2014 9:30 PM, Roger Broseus wrote:
> Jim,
>
> Why and why and why?
>
> I have done numerous - make that countless - creations, deletions, and resizings of partitions and had zero problems except when +I+ screwed up. With one exception and that was the last millennium using the partitioner that came with Mandrake (now Mandriva) Linux. It made overlapping partitions.
>
> The apps have included qtparted, Partition Magic, disk manager (palimpsest), Easeus partition manager, etc. I've shrunk Windows partitions, including NTFS to setup dual boot.
>




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