Re:

["Alfred M. Szmidt" <ams@kemisten.nu>]

   What's the preferred method for creating the partition(s)?

Then one you prefer.

   Which reminds me.  Not to jump topics in a thread but is there a
   native partition utility in the Hurd?  I don't see fdisk, pdisk,
   cfdisk or any others that I know???

We use GNU Parted.  You could also just create a file and start the
translator on that instead of creating an partition on the hard-disk.
I think that this is called loopback in GNU/Linux lingo.