I've picked up an HP SimpleSave sd500a backup drive.  This is a 2.5, 500GB drive.  It has a mysterious CD-like partition, but otherwise seems to contain a WD Scorpio Blue disk.  It seems that the CD-like partition is implemented in the enclosure's firmware, but I've no way to be certain of this.I'm repartitioning the drive for the first time.  When attempting to open the drive using cfdisk /dev/sdb, it exits with status 4 after outputting this error message:FATAL ERROR: Bad primary partition 0: Partition ends in the final partial cylindersfdisk -l is able to output info on the drive without errors:Disk /dev/sdb: 60715 cylinders, 255 heads, 63 sectors/trackUnits = cylinders of 8225280 bytes, blocks of 1024 bytes, counting from 0   Device Boot Start     End   #cyls    #blocks   Id  System/dev/sdb1          0+  60715-  60716- 487699456    7  HPFS/NTFS/dev/sdb2          0       -       0          0    0  Empty/dev/sdb3          0       -       0          0    0  Empty/dev/sdb4          0       -       0          0    0  EmptyIs the error from cfdisk any reason to question the stability of the drive or the compatibility of its firmware?
Errors from cfdisk with new external USB backup drive
partition;fdisk;sfdisk;cfdisk
cfdisk reads the partition table of the device at startup, it will exit if the geometry of a partition is wrong. You can force cfdisk to not read the existing partition table by adding -z:cfdisk -z /dev/sdbThis is a cfdisk specific behavior, fdisk will show a similar error but won't exit. The stability of the drive is not affected, it's just a partition issue.Alternatively use a partition tool like fdisk, parted or gparted.I've just checked my own partition and the first one (/boot) also reported this error. I never had any problems with it.