Most _recent_ tools ( parted 2.1 ) util-linux-ng as of... *tries to remember* some really new release (Fedora 13 has it, 12 does not) work with the new disks perfectly as well.
parted even goes as far as to yell at you if you have the wrong alignment, and offers to fix it for you.
However, you may have to use % based partitions for parted to be able to fix the auto-alignment, otherwise it complains.
mkpart primary ext3 0% +200M
mkpart primary ext4 200M 100%
Or however you want to work things.
Posted Mar 18, 2010 20:38 UTC (Thu) by till (subscriber, #50712)
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gdisk aka GPT fdisk ( http://www.rodsbooks.com/gdisk/whygdisk.html ) on Fedora 12 seems to work nicely, too. It aligns data by default and does not irritate with obscure old data like CHS and the partitions seem to be supported by linux. I don't care about Windows, though.