Why reboot after fdisk of external drive?

[John Summerfield]

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?

Sounds like nonsense to me. If you don't need to reboot between 
partitioning and formatting an internal drive when you installed Linux, 
why do it to an external drive?

fdisk and its kin issue the magic command to make the kernel reread the 
partition table, and even if it didn't, at the very worst, the most 
you'd need to do is "safely remove" it.


> 
> 1/  http://www-personal.umich.edu/~hnarayan/maxtor-harddrive-linux.html
> 2/  http://www.totalpenguin.com/content/view/25/40/
> 
>