parted

A tool for disk partitioning and partition resizing.

Description

The parted command is a powerful disk partitioning and partition resizing tool developed by the GNU project. Unlike fdisk, it supports resizing partitions. Designed for Linux, it handles common partition formats including ext2, ext3, fat16, fat32, NTFS, ReiserFS, JFS, XFS, UFS, HFS, and Linux swap.

Syntax

parted [options] [device [command [arguments...]]]

Options

-h, --help      # Display help information.
-i, --interactive # Interactive mode.
-s, --script    # Script mode, no user prompting.
-v, --version   # Display version information.

Parameters

• Device: The device file corresponding to the hard disk to be partitioned (e.g., /dev/sdb).
• Command: The parted command to be executed.

Examples

With the advent of serial technology, more users are choosing large-capacity SATA hard drives to create disk arrays. In particular, MD1000/MD3000 systems easily exceed 2TB LUNs. Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 Update 4 and later support disk devices larger than 2 terabytes (TB).

Here are the steps to partition a disk using GPT:

[root@localhost ~]# fdisk -l
...
Disk /dev/sdb: 2147 MB, 2147483648 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 261 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk /dev/sdb doesn't contain a valid partition table

Start parted on the device:

[root@localhost ~]# parted /dev/sdb
GNU Parted Copyright (C) 1998 - 2004 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
...
Using /dev/sdb
(parted) mklabel gpt
(parted) print
Disk geometry for /dev/sdb: 0.000-2048.000 megabytes
Disk label type: gpt
Minor   Start       End         Filesystem  Name                  Flags
(parted) mkpart primary 0 2048  # Use the numbers shown in the print output
(parted) print
Disk geometry for /dev/sdb: 0.000-2048.000 megabytes
Disk label type: gpt
Minor   Start       End         Filesystem  Name                  Flags
1       0.017       2047.983
(parted) quit

Don't forget to update /etc/fstab if necessary.

Verify with fdisk -l:

[root@localhost ~]# fdisk -l
...
WARNING: GPT (GUID Partition Table) detected on '/dev/sdb'! The util fdisk doesn't support GPT. Use GNU Parted.

Disk /dev/sdb: 2147 MB, 2147483648 bytes
...
   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sdb1               1         262     2097151+  ee  EFI GPT

Format the new partition:

[root@localhost ~]# mkfs.ext3 /dev/sdb1
...

Mount and check the disk space:

[root@localhost ~]# mount /dev/sdb1 /mnt
[root@localhost ~]# df -h
Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda3              32G  2.6G   28G   9% /
/dev/sda1              99M   12M   82M  13% /boot
none                  252M     0  252M   0% /dev/shm
/dev/sdb1             2.0G   36M  1.9G   2% /mnt