The state of partitioning tools?
What is the state of partitioning tools in Linux? Which tools are recommend and which should I stay away from? Namely I am interested in fdisk
, cfdisk
, sfdisk
and the fdisk
and cfdisk
variants that come in the gnu-fdisk
package. The "go to" solution these days would be parted
I assume?
I am asking this because I used to use cfdisk
years ago, but now I am sitting here with a new 3TB disk and cfdisk
is displaying completely wrong information, it's displaying a partition as 375GB in size and free space available even so there is a single partition of 3TB and no free space. If I switch over to cfdisk
from the gnu-fdisk
package, it will display correct information, but now fdisk.gnu-fdisk
won't display anything. Meanwhile the regular fdisk
that comes by default with Ubuntu would display things correctly. sfdisk
seems to work, but is lacking support for the newer GPT partition tables.
Essentially half of those tools don't seem to work properly. So should I just forget them and do everything with parted
from now on? Are the gdisk
tools ready for prime time or are there any drawbacks to using GPT? Are there other tools I should be aware of?
Solution 1:
For working with GPT disks, you need either something based on libparted (parted
, GParted, etc.) or my GPT fdisk (gdisk
, sgdisk
, and cgdisk
) tools. The latter come in the Ubuntu gdisk
package, IIRC. Since you say you're familiar with cfdisk
, I recommend you check out cgdisk
, since the latter is modeled after the former, but for GPT disks.
Personally, I'd avoid the GNU fdisk package; it's an attempt to slap an fdisk-like user interface atop libparted, but the result is something that omits the functionality that makes fdisk
worthwhile to begin with.
Edit (March, 2017):
The older fdisk
and related tools (sfdisk
and cfdisk
) now support GPT, too. IIRC, Ubuntu 14.10 or 15.04 was the first version of Ubuntu to ship with the updated tools, so you should have those unless you're running an older distribution. The last I checked, my GPT fdisk provided more comprehensive support for GPT-specific features, but fdisk
and its brethren should be fine for most day-to-day operations.