Simon Slater wrote:
G'day again, It must be my day for questions. This more for filling in
the blanks than problem solving.
I'm thinking of getting a Maxtor OneTouch IV 250GB external drive, so I
googled other peoples experiences. On 2 sites (below) I found similar
explanations of the steps to get one working under Linux. Both say to
reboot between fdisk and mkfs. Why?
1/ http://www-personal.umich.edu/~hnarayan/maxtor-harddrive-linux.html
2/ http://www.totalpenguin.com/content/view/25/40/
Years ago, the advice was to do sync;sync;sync to ensure that the
changes were written out to the disk drive before you actually formatted
it. I believe that recently the problem was to guarantee that the
kernel hadn't cached the "old" partition table and scribbled in the
wrong places during formatting.
I have run mkfs after partitioning on a number of disk (thank goodness I
don't have to do this very often) without rebooting, so it may just be
either paranoia, or an obscure problem with a specific chipset, or ....
YMMV, and I am not responsible if you try this and screw your disk up. B^)
BTW, I have to believe that external drives (most of which are
hot-pluggable) should not be subject to this restriction. If they are
truly hot pluggable, then the most you should have to do is:
run fdisk
sync
unplug the drive
plug the drive back in
run mkfs
I have not tried this yet (my first external hard drive is still
en-route from the retailer I've bought it from).
--
Kevin J. Cummings
kjchome@xxxxxxx
cummings@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
cummings@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Registered Linux User #1232 (http://counter.li.org)
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