install gparted on Ubuntu 8.10

[lazer100]

On 17-Sep-12 23:19:49 Nils Kassube wrote:
>Doug wrote:
>> Interesting, Nils. I didn't know that the partitions had to be
>> formatted. Normally, any partition I make I will also format, so I
>> guess I had never run into that.

>If you use e.g. gparted it will automatically format the partitions 
>according to the selected file system

you can select "unformatted" as the formatting option with gparted on 8.10,

but it only shows this option for formatted partitions if you first delete
the partition and then create a new one.

this option isnt shown if you reformat an already formatted one.

I used this in order to zero the drive, as there were some problems zeroing
an already formatted one as I think the zeroing interferes with the file
system,
not sure.

I divided the drive up into several partitions, in order that each 
zeroing would be say less than 4 hours.


> but if you use good old fdisk, it 
>will only write the partition table and not format anything. And if you 
>overwrite a partition with zeroes, like the OP wanted to do, it is also 
>not formatted afterwards.

this not being formatted afterwards leads to some problems!
so I needed to unformat the drive initially
with gparted as mentioned above,

another problem which happened was that when you delete and reformat as
unformatted, the partition numbering changes, which makes it more effort
to keep track of which ones had been zeroed.


I managed to get them into ascending numbers, but with some numbers missing,

I dont know if there is any way to renumber the partitions,

so they ascend sdc1 sdc2 sdc3 ....

in the end I drew a diagram of the disk for which parts had been zeroed.


one other problem I had is that one mustnt zero the extended partition
as its not a proper partition!

in order to have lots of partitions for zeroing the drive, its best just
to make the entire drive an extended partition.


I can see now that 1tb drives arent necessarily a good idea because
it took me about 1 week to salvage the drive initially, and probably
at least a day to zero the drive, and the best part of a day to 
rerun a low level salvage scan to verify nothing was left.



> These are just two ways to get unformatted 
>partitions and I suppose there are several more ways.

>> What does Ubuntu use in place of
>> Dolphin? (It's been quite a while since I had an Ubuntu distro on
>> one of my machines.)

>I have no idea - I'm a Kubuntu user ...


>Nils

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