[rhelv6-beta-list] fdisk vs parted

Chris Adams cmadams at hiwaay.net
Fri Dec 3 14:17:40 UTC 2010


Once upon a time, Nico Kadel-Garcia <nkadel at gmail.com> said:
> If it hasn't been deprecated, it *should* be. fdisk is extremely
> awkward to work with from a command line or non-interactive sessions,
> and very awkward to do subtleties like selecting the block to start a
> partition with (critical to 4096 byte block alignment with NFS based
> OS images that reside on external, 4096 byte block aligned storage
> such as NetApps).

It is quite easy to configure fdisk to get the desired sector alignment;
it even prints a message telling you what to do when you start it.

I find parted awkward to use myself.  You still have to change options
to show sector alignment, and as far as I can tell, you can't actually
set partition types if needed (you can chose from its recognized "flags"
but that is it).  The only advantage to parted is that it can handle GPT
labels (AFAIK it is the only tool in the distribution that can do that).

-- 
Chris Adams <cmadams at hiwaay.net>
Systems and Network Administrator - HiWAAY Internet Services
I don't speak for anybody but myself - that's enough trouble.




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