[PLUG] Asterisk In cfdisk

Dale Snell ddsnell at frontier.com
Tue Feb 21 21:51:44 UTC 2012


On Tue, 21 Feb 2012 12:42:09 -0800 (PST)
Rich Shepard <rshepard at appl-ecosys.com> wrote:

>    Running cfdisk on a new machine. There are 3 partitions: sda1 is
> 300G, sda2 is 8G swap, and sda3 is 192G. There's an asterisk next to
> the size on sda3; what does this mean?

According to the cfdisk(8) man page, the asterisk means that the
partition is not aligned on a cylinder boundary.  I'm not sure that's
really important these days.  If you need a DOS partition, perhaps,
but Linux doesn't care.

>    When the installation disk asks to format each partition and I
> select the quick check with ext3 as the filesystem, sda1 completes
> very quickly but sda3 takes a very long time. It's as though a quick
> format cannot be done on this partition. Is this related to the
> asterisk after the size?

This shouldn't be related to the partition alignment at all.  Other
than that, I'm not sure what to say.  What do you mean by "quick
format"?  mke2fs(8)'s run time depends mostly on the size of the
partition, unless you're running with the -c (bad blocks check)
option.  To the best of my knowledge, there is no "quick format"
option.  There is the "-S" option, but that only reinitializes the
superblocks and group descriptors, it doesn't do anything else.

--Dale

-- 
"Zathras is used to being beast of burden to other people's
needs.  Very sad life.  Probably have very sad death, but at least
there is symmetry."  -- "War Without End, Part 1", _Babylon 5_



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