with/no fdisk when adding disk

[Liam Proven]

On 29 August 2016 at 05:32, Peter Silva <peter at bsqt.homeip.net> wrote:
> There are many options...  fdisk is a dos/windows oriented
> partitioner.

This is not true.

Linux has a variety of fdisk tools and it is 100% normal practice to use them.

> I have never used fdisk on linux.  The "normal" tool for
> that is "parted", (or the gui version: gparted)

Not true -- parted is an alternative, for dynamic disk partition
resizing, but there's no need to use it and there's no particular
reason or need to.

Just because you're more familiar with it does not make it more
standard or anything.

> but there are also
> volume managers, such as lvm,

These are not alternatives or equivalents to fdisk, gparted etc. They
are different ways of managing drives, but it is possible to use them
alongside fdisk or other tools.

> and filesystems that subsume volume
> management, such as btrfs, or zfs.

ZFS, yes.

Btrfs, no. It can do this but it's not recommended -- you can't have
swap, you can't hibernate, you can't boot UEFI computers off it, and
so on.

Btrfs can be used on a normal partition like any other Linux
filesystem and that's the normal route.

> There isn't a simple answer to your question.   there are many
> different answers for many different situations.   What is the file
> system for?  (laptop/server, are you going to use multiple disks
> together to make one virtual disk?, removable media?, accessible by
> multiple OS's? which OSes?)

Well, yes, there is. For normal use, the OP should partition their
drive with whatever partitioning tool they prefer, as normal, and put
filesystems in the partitions.

Do not format raw drives in normal use.

For this partitioning, fdisk or sfdisk or cfdisk are all perfectly
acceptable tools that I use frequently.

I appreciate that you are trying to be helpful here, but you need to
check that what you believe is in fact correct before issuing
categorial statements. We all make mistakes, so it is wise to check
before answering.

-- 
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