I mainly send this to the kernel list to warn a lot of people once again:
The program fdisk is *extremely* buggy (and has always been buggy).
Never use it in unusual circumstances.
After it had destroyed a filesystem of mine some years ago,
I wrote sfdisk, which is correct (as far as I know) but
very user unfriendly.
People needing an fdisk today should use cfdisk - nice, friendly,
correct - as far as I know.
(Since recently there is also Disk Wizard or so from Red Hat -
the 5.0 version is broken, but soon that may be a viable alternative.)
[If fdisk is so buggy, then why isnt it thrown out?
It should be, but so far nobody has taken the trouble
to port bsd disklabel support to some other fdisk.]
[The patched version of fdisk can be found in
ftp.win.tue.nl:/pub/linux/util/util-linux-2.7b.tar.gz
or so. I am not interested in fdisk flaws, know lots of them myself,
but patches are not refused, and if you find file-system-corrupting
bugs I would like to know, and will fix them.
On the other hand, I want to hear about every tiny flaw in cfdisk]
Andries
For the obligatory linux-kernel contribution:
People have complained that "fdisk -l" tries to read
/dev/hdc which is a CDROM, which leads to kernel error
messages on the console, etc. Ugly.
I avoided this problem in cfdisk by first doing HDIO_GETGEO,
which will fail for a CDROM, but it would be nice if it were
possible (using some ioctl?) to ask for the type of some device.
Many people do not configure or mount /proc, so this information
should preferably be available independent of /proc. mlord?
Replies to aeb@cwi.nl
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