Linux Cookbook, 2nd Edition

Chapter 8. Managing Disk Partitioning with parted

All mass storage drives—SATA hard disks, solid state drives, USB drives, SD (Secure Digital), NVMe (Non-Volatile Memory Express), and CompactFlash cards—must be partitioned and formatted with filesystems before you can use them. They all ship with some kind of partitioning and filesystems, which may not be what you want. As your needs change, you will want to repartition your disks and use different filesystems. In this chapter you will learn about using parted (partition editor) to manage partitioning.

Overview

parted only manages partitioning; see Chapter 11 to learn about filesystems. Chapter 9 covers the graphical frontend to parted, GParted, which manages both partitioning and filesystems.

You will also learn about the modern replacement for the Master Boot Record (MBR), which is the elderly and inadequate legacy partition table. The MBR has been supplanted by the new Globally Unique Identifier Partition Table (GUID Partition Table or GPT).

parted shows partition information and adds, removes, and resizes partitions. parted has just one gotcha: it writes your changes to disk immediately, so you must be careful. GParted does not apply changes until you click a button.

It is a common convenience to call all mass storage devices disks, even though many of them are not disks anymore, but solid-state devices, like USB sticks. Why not, when we still dial telephones, and make tape recordings and film videos with our smartphones? ...