I am setting up my new hard drive.

[mcc@mastodon.social]

*before performing any computer task* Hey, Mastodon‚ is this tool… haunted?

[glyph@mastodon.social]

@mcc I … really don't want to say anything definitive about relative hauntedness, but my experience with disk tools is that you want to just use the Linux stuff for everything. Microsoft has written just enough disk tooling that it works for Windows, because Windows is mostly ignorant of the existence of Linux. Linux, however, is keenly aware of Windows's existence at every moment, and thus even if the tools are missing some features or have some bugs, they have at least been a *little* tested

[glyph@mastodon.social]

@mcc if anyone else has more specific guidance or recent (<10 years, at least on Intel) experience, listen to them instead

[mcc@mastodon.social]

@glyph this matches what other people said and it's good to hear. everyone else said linux can even format your NTFS partition.

what i know is that for *BOOT* partitions windows gets angry if it can't create the partitions itself, but this is not a boot disk.

[glyph@mastodon.social]

@mcc IIRC the windows boot-partition problem is that the Windows installer kinda sucks, and just expects to be able to create a bootable partition "in the flow" of doing other random stuff, and if it can't, then it gets mad; not that the partition has the "created by windows" magic flag but rather that it cannot happen "here, at the appropriate 'Time To Format The Disk' step". But of course there's a weird caveat for "a disk with Windows already installed"

[mhoye@cosocial.ca]

@mcc diskmgmt.msc is one hundred percent haunted. You want to use diskpart in an administrator-account cmd window instead.

[mcc@mastodon.social]

@mhoye okay. that was literally my initial impulse so i'm glad to have it validated.

[mcc@mastodon.social]

@glyph i have heard claims of windows just fuckin breaking grub if you install it second. don't know if that holds up to reality.

[glyph@mastodon.social]

@mcc oh yeah it absolutely does that, because it doesn't believe grub exists. you're installing windows, which means you want windows to boot. if there is some detritus in the boot sector _obviously_ it would delete that

[mhoye@cosocial.ca]

@mcc Your instincts are correct.

[vojta001@gts.vkane.cz]

@mcc Yeah, I don't think it will batch any jobs. It's a pretty straightforward program.

Using tools you already know and trust is definitely a good idea, I was just wondering whether there is any gotcha with the windows utility I wasn't aware of yet.

[a2_4am@mastodon.social]

@mcc "GPT's haunted."

[gwenverbsnouns@mastodon.social]

@mcc last I checked, which was wildly outdated like a decade ago, it was easier to install windows first over the whole disk, then fix the situation in gparted later. windows doesn't generally understand that it has to share

[orca@nya.one]

@mcc@mastodon.social I don't think that matters.

Though creating GPT on a disk under Windows would automatically creates a Microsoft Reserved (MSR) partition that's about 128 or 256 MB in size. You can see or delete that partitionwith command line tool diskpart under Windows (or any other partitioner softwares of your liking, MSRs' are only hidden in diskmgmt.msc ). It wasn't anywhere near affecting functionality, but it's certainly annoying.
Edit: and you can certainly say diskmgmt.msc is haunted because of that :)

Oh, and, if you're installing Windows on this disk (skip this entire section if you're not) and intent to use diskpart to create partition layout for it, remember to format EFI System Partition after creation because diskpart default to not automatically formatting the partitions it created, and ESP aren't formattable in diskmgmt.msc or windows file explorer.

[faraiwe@mstdn.social]

@glyph @mcc ::motions at the sea of broken GRUB sectors, f*ed up by windows disk tools:: Lo! There do I see...

[hatzka@tech.lgbt]

@dlakelan I thought it would be obvious, but I meant using LUKS with a blank passphrase and scrambling the passphrase when you decommission the drive.

as I understand it, LUKS master keys are not derived directly from the passphrase but instead generated randomly and encrypted with it, precisely so that you can change the password without rewriting the whole drive. so scrambling the LUKS password should render the data just as unrecoverable as your strategy would with less effort, shouldn't it?

[kwi@mastodon.online]

@hatzka @dlakelan Correct. The (blank) passphrase just decrypts a key slot containing the randomly generated key used for actual disk encryption, and removing these key slots renders the partition unreadable. https://www.man7.org/linux/man-pages/man8/cryptsetup-erase.8.html

[jerojasro@col.social]

@mcc reverse Betteridge's Law applies here.

[onyxraven@hachyderm.io]

@glyph @mcc IIRC there’s some arcane writings on the correct order of things to make modern windows happy (tpm/secure boot and drive encryption throw a wrench in things I think) AND have it not clobber grub/etc. it’s been a while.

I had to do some similar malarkey with macos on an intel mini and at some point I lost the ability to boot the macos partition (frankly, no loss, it was ancient and I only boot it to Linux now)