it's weird how disk partitioning even on EFI machines appears to be one of those "updating the updater" kind of paradoxes where it has to be done in a very specific way or the pc reacts as if the floor just slid out from underneath it
like i know DOS couldn't do reparts on the fly but as far as i can tell that was entirely because they hadn't structured the code for it, not any kind of system limitation
if you try to do anything with flash drives in particular though OSes just freak the FUCK OUT. i've had this on windows but on linux as well - if the MBR/GPT on a flash drive is sufficiently weird the OS just becomes allergic to it
it feels like an infohazard, like the OS doesn't have the ability to look at it from a low level or something. like they implemented the partition manager at the wrong layer of abstraction for userland utilities to be able to healthily interact with it
i've repartitioned flash drives under linux, like with fdisk and "make new partition table," and gotten weird fucking errors that, as far as i could tell, suggested that even fdisk was not able to look objectively at the disk and was relying on system calls
and i know for a fact that there is a state you can get flash drives into (balena etcher seems to cause it a lot) where windows absolutely will not touch them in any way unless you perform a specific series of incantations in diskpart that literally make no sense
and i found a page that i've since lost that explained that it was some particular flag being set that just tweaks the windows disk manager right out. seems like it happens to linux as well, just differently.
I mean I wiped flash drives by fucking, dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdb, and STILL couldn't get a clean partition table on them. It wasn't like this in 2004 so idk what happened.
perhaps systemd is to blame
