Sunshine story / Parted (no bug report)

[Gunnar Isaksson]

Thank you guys!

I recently bought a big IBM 46GB IDE disk for my Linux
firewall. Installed the disk, BIOS and kernel agreed
on the geometri. Everything seemed fine until I started
fdisk, it dumped core. Also cfdisk dumped core. I got
some strange error message about a missing partition
table. It's a very rare occasion nowadays to see such
programs dump core.

I believe that fdisk/cfdisk had some kind of bug and
simply couldn't handle this disk. I then remeberd the
Parted software and that it might be able to do the
partioning and ext2 formatting.

Downloading and compiling parted-1.4.8 was a piece of
cake. Started reading the documentation and found the
command 'mklabel' that creates the partiontable of
choice. Remembering that strange error message about
the missing partiontable. I runned 'mklabel msdos'
and got a partion table on the disk.

Tried fdisk again to see if it still dumps core and no
it didn't. Fdisk could now do the job of creating all
my partitions. 

I really used just one single command in Parted
and it solved my problem and saved the day and a
great disk.

Thank you guy's for making Parted, it's such a wonderful
piece of software.


//Gunnar Isaksson