Klaus Knopper answers your Linux questions

Ask Klaus

Article from Issue 190/2016
Author(s):

New fdisk behavior, booting Knoppix from USB, and using PHP mail() in Apache.

New Linux fdisk Partitioning Tool

I've read your article about repartitioning the hard disk using the famous fdisk command-line tool. I tend to partition a disk in a way that starts and ends partitions at cylinders, in order to adapt to the mechanical specs of the disk. However, the newer versions of fdisk that come with Knoppix 7.7 no longer show the disk geometry in cylinders and heads; all settings are based on sectors of 512 or 4096 bytes, depending on the disk's physical sector size.

Do I have to install an old version of fdisk in order to restore the old, cylinder-based behavior?

To illustrate what happens, start an fdisk session. Unless you quit fdisk with the w command for "write," nothing will be changed or saved on disk, so make sure you quit with q when leaving the program (unless you really want to change the disk's partitioning).

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