Linux Administration Cookbook

How it works...

When we carved our physical device (sdb) into two partitions, we created them using fdisk.

First, though, we had to give the disk a partition table, where it could store the information about the partitions we're creating.

The classic partition table is called Master Boot Record (MBR) and the new-school one is called GUID Partition Table (GPT).

You may still see MBR systems floating around, but GPT is objectively better to use these days, allowing for things such as more than four primary partitions (which MBR is limited to).

You can view the partitions on a disk by again loading fdisk and passing p on the command line:

Command (m for help): pDisk /dev/sdb: 2147 MB, 2147483648 bytes, 4194304 sectorsUnits = sectors of 1 * 512 ...