Why reboot after fdisk of external drive?

[Kevin Cummings]

Simon Slater wrote:
> 	G'day again, It must be my day for questions.  This more for filling in
> the blanks than problem solving.
> 
> 	I'm thinking of getting a Maxtor OneTouch IV 250GB external drive, so I
> googled other peoples experiences. On 2 sites (below) I found similar
> explanations of the steps to get one working under Linux.  Both say to
> reboot between fdisk and mkfs. Why?
> 
> 1/  http://www-personal.umich.edu/~hnarayan/maxtor-harddrive-linux.html
> 2/  http://www.totalpenguin.com/content/view/25/40/

Years ago, the advice was to do sync;sync;sync to ensure that the 
changes were written out to the disk drive before you actually formatted 
it.  I believe that recently the problem was to guarantee that the 
kernel hadn't cached the "old" partition table and scribbled in the 
wrong places during formatting.

I have run mkfs after partitioning on a number of disk (thank goodness I 
don't have to do this very often) without rebooting, so it may just be 
either paranoia, or an obscure problem with a specific chipset, or ....

YMMV, and I am not responsible if you try this and screw your disk up.  B^)

BTW, I have to believe that external drives (most of which are 
hot-pluggable) should not be subject to this restriction.  If they are 
truly hot pluggable, then the most you should have to do is:

run fdisk
sync
unplug the drive
plug the drive back in
run mkfs

I have not tried this yet (my first external hard drive is still 
en-route from the retailer I've bought it from).

-- 
Kevin J. Cummings
kjchome at rcn.com
cummings at kjchome.homeip.net
cummings at kjc386.framingham.ma.us
Registered Linux User #1232 (http://counter.li.org)