On Mon, Feb 13, 2012 at 09:58:42AM -0500, Matthew Gillen wrote: > I got a new thumb drive, and I decided to check it out on my linux box > before using it. Fdisk shows this: > > Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System > /dev/sdb1 * 8064 31293439 15642688 c W95 FAT32 (LBA) > > I thought the start block being so high we sort of odd. I know that the > version of fdisk with Fedora 16 seems to be showing more than it used to > (i.e., the start block is usually now 2048 instead of 0, I'm assuming > that means it is representing the MBR where it did not in the past).
No, everyone used to start their partitions at 63 (track 1 for a 63-sectors-per-track disk). The reason for the switch to 2048 (1MB) was for erase block alignment on SSDs. Windows 7 does this too. > So the 2048 start block is what I expect. If my calculations are > correct, this drive has 1909 blocks / MB, so there appears to be about > 3MB of unused space before the first partition. > > Using dd to copy this sdb2 device to a file then opening it in a > hex-editor shows that the partition is all zeros. > > Is there a legitimate reason for what I'm seeing? Are they just leaving > some space for re-mapping bad sectors? Why not do that at the end of > the drive? No idea why it started at 8063. What are the CHS values in the partition table? Sometimes USB flash memory has weird CHS settings. _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
