Graphical installers have their place, but in your case, as often happens, they help you do something without helping you to understand how you'd do it manually. This is one thing I like about Arch; ...

I want to ask a couple of questions. 1) I was wondering if there was a serious performance impact to formatting a Linux partition with the following commands: mkfs.ext2 -i 1024 -b 1024 /dev/hda1 ...