On 2011/07/27 05:35, Nico Kadel-Garcia wrote:
> 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.

For that and other reasons I have found gpartd to be as close to
utterly useless as it gets.

> 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.

Getting it right is not that hard. And I bet fdisk could be twiddled to
do it easily. I'd not want to get into partd. It struck me as an utter
mess.

But, then, I've never found a GUI friendly tool to be close to
satisfactory. I got too used to lower level tools back in the 80s and
early 90s that I'd built. It allowed me to perform some strange tests
to see if the file systems I was working with really behaved as the
designer advertised. {^_-} With hard disks I like to have a clearer
idea of exactly what I am doing than I get with GUI based apps. And
for this need that's required because the GUI tools don't work right.

(I won't get into how many other aspects of Linux distros I've found
work better with bare metal work rather than GUIs. Firewalls come to
mind immediately.)

{o.o}