Why reboot after fdisk of external drive?

[Simon Slater]

	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/


-- 
Regards
Simon