UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

I m not sure if this is a right question to ask .

During the installation of the OS, installation sw does partitioning for you.
I m not quit sure if they have used parted or fdisk to partition the disk.
(If they are using fdisk then you can't make partition > 2Tb )correct me if i m wrong.Also it is recommended to use parted as fdisk is going to be deprecated .

Is this a recommended way to partition or we should use a standard utility to partition the disk first and then Use install CD/usb to install the OS.

Hope this is not a weird question asked here.

fdisk has been "depreciated" for decades and is open-source anyway; if people want it they'll get it. It's not going to die.

It does have limitations as you've stated of course, because the kind of partitions it edits -- MS-DOS style partitions -- have those limitations.

parted is not for a different kind of partition -- It can operate on the same kind of partitions that fdisk does. It can also operate on other kinds. So the question isn't merely what editor you use; it's what kind of volumes you use, quite independent of the editor...

Modern Disks are not going to be any less than 1-2 TB.Agree Fdisk may not be fully deprecated but considering the DISK growth it will soon be deprecated.

The question of people choosing it depends on the limitation associated with it.
If i find something with limitations i rather not get it.

I heard gdisk and parted are used to overcome this issue.
The thing that confuses me everytime is why do they create new things rather than upgrading existing one.
For example it could have been solved by giving new version of fdisk like fdisk1 or something.

Now they have included gdisk and parted which is kind of redundant .
if gnu parted had issues then fix it rather than creating something new.


Not able to find gdisk installed in OEL or RHEL?
It is something i need to install separately.
GOD please make linux user friendly...

fdisk is meant to manage raw MSDOS partitions and related types, and has never done anything else. If you think it would be so easy to nail new and unrelated functionality onto the side, you're welcome to, but if you make even the most minor error, people will crucify you for ruining their data. Writing a partition editor isn't something to be done in an offhand manner.

Microsoft mostly still uses this boot schema too, making it very hard to avoid, and the better alternatives aren't universally supported. Not really. gdisk is GNOME I believe, while parted runs anywhere, doesn't even need a GUI. That's crucial if you want to edit partitions in rescue-cd conditions, or do any kind of automatic partition editing.

Anyway, you're mistaking the forest for the trees again. It's not the partition editor which overcomes the limitations -- the partition editor doesn't get stored in the boot sector, after all. It's the partition types themselves. MSDOS partitions have these limitations. Some more modern partition editors can write GPT partition tables, which overcome these limits.

Thanks Mod that was very informative.

---------- Post updated at 10:15 PM ---------- Previous update was at 10:10 PM ----------



Can you put more focus on why there is a dependency on Microsoft when both are different product ? Are you leaning towards dual boot?
If MS-Dos partition is old then How microsoft is dealing with the issue? I know this is not something to be posted in LQ but still curious to know.

You don't need MS-DOS to use an MS-DOS boot sector, so it's not really "depending on microsoft" here. The point is, up to now they've worked portably. Linux and Windows and OSX(it has to, to understand standard USB flash drives) and a big variety of off-the-shelf tools like Partition Magic can understand them. Abandon that de-facto standard and suddenly, you're left to your own devices. I believe there's features in the NTFS filesystem itself to overcome this but obviously this isn't much help to other operating systems.