bad block/superblock on new disk?

[Volker Wysk]

Am Samstag, den 23.05.2020, 10:59 +0000 schrieb Marco Fioretti:
> Oh boy, I had forgotten that. I got confused because I had just done
> the same thing (that is, power up, and go straight with mkfs -t ext4)
> on another disk from another brand, without any problem. Probably
> that disk had come with a partition table from factory, and this had
> nothing at all, instead?
> 
> I am not at my computer right now, but will try running fdisk to
> create the partition/partition table later today. In the meantime,
> further feedback/comments/pointer remain very welcome!

Nowadays, You have the choice between two partition table standards,
the old MBR standard and the new GPT, which replaces MBR. The latter is
part of the UEFI standard. Use fdisk for an MBR and gdisk for GPT. If
your machine is a newer model, it is UEFI. 

If you don't want to boot from your disk, it probably doesn't matter,
but I'm not sure. Could please someone please fill in on this?


> On Sat, May 23, 2020 at 12:05, Volker Wysk <post at volker-wysk.de>
> wrote:
> > Am Samstag, den 23.05.2020, 11:42 +0200 schrieb M. Fioretti:
> > > On Sat, May 23, 2020 05:28:32 AM -0400, Gene Heskett wrote:
> > > 
> > > > Even if you are going to format the whole drive to one
> > > > filesystem,
> > > > you 
> > > > still need a partition table.
> > > 
> > > sorry, I'm surely missing something basic here, but... why would
> > > I
> > > need to pass a partition table, if I understand your question?
> > > 
> > > Doesn't "mkfs -t ext4" just means "the hell with whatever is on
> > > that
> > > disk, make of it one ext4 partition, and you create a partition
> > > table"?
> > 
> > No, the partitioning is done by a separate program, such as fdisk
> > or
> > gdisk. "mkfs" won't do any partitioning.

Cheers,
Volker