On Wed, Jul 27, 2011 at 2:13 AM, jdow <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> On 2011/07/26 21:30, Yasha Karant wrote:
>>
>> For reasons that are irrelevant to this discussion, we have ended up with
>> a
>> number of new workstations with WD Advanced Format "green" 1.5 TByte
>> drives.
>> We have been experiencing a number of difficulties that had to do with
>> partition boundaries, etc. After a bit of digging, I found:
>>
>>
>> http://community.wdc.com/t5/Desktop/Problem-with-WD-Advanced-Format-drive-in-LINUX-WD15EARS/td-p/6395
>>
>>
>> Is anyone using a WD Advanced Format drive with SL 6? We are not and
>> probably will/can not use LVM, but rather standard ext 2, 3, or 4
>> partitions, included the extended partition model.
>>
>> If you are using this type of drive, information on the specifics of the
>> formatting command(s) and syntax to use these WD drives would be
>> appreciated. Any link to a detailed document or URL would be appreciated.
>>
>> Yasha Karant
>
> I know what I would attempt in a pinch. I sort of "dig" partition formats
> having been one of the guilty parties for the Amiga partitioning scheme.
> It led me to doing obscene things and realize they often work.
>
> I notice that fdisk has a mode for creating partitions based on block
> number rather than artificial cylinders.

fdisk is a mother and a half to script. Parsing its output to find
appropriate values, then feeding them through an "expect" wrapper to
get them entered through any automated process, has turned into
unnecessary pain since "parted" was written. parted is my friend for
this. Unfortunately, the "Gnome parted", or "gparted, does not give
access to the sector selection options, so it's quite useless for this
work.

I've previously written tools to actually do the pre-alignment in
kickstart. It makes a tremendous difference in virtualization guests,
whose disk images have no way to detect the underlying architectures
4096 byte block alignments but who can benefit tremendously from doing
so, especially if the server for the guest images is a NetApp on the
back end.