Parted is a GNU utility, which is used to manipulate the hard disk partitions.
Using parted, you can add, delete, and edit partitions and the file systems located on those partitions. You can also clone partitions.
This article explains 9 practical parted command examples.
Warning: Parted utility manipulates the hard disk partition table and saves the changes immediately. So, don’t delete, modify, add, or do anything to your partition, if you don’t know what you are doing. You will lose your data! There is no undo button for your rescue!
1. Select the hard disk to be parted
When you execute parted command without any argument, by default it selects the first hard disk drive that is available on your system.
In the following example, it picked /dev/sda automatically as it is the first hard drive in this system.
# parted GNU Parted 2.3 Using /dev/sda Welcome to GNU Parted! Type 'help' to view a list of commands. (parted)
To choose a different hard disk, use the select command as shown below.
(parted) select /dev/sdb
It will throw the following error message when it doesn’t find the given hard disk name.
Error: Error opening /dev/sdb: No medium found Retry/Cancel? y
2. Display all Partitions Using print
Using the print command, you can view all the available partitions in the selected hard disk. The print command also displays hard disk properties such as model, size, sector size and partition table as shown below.
(parted) print Model: ATA WDC WD5000BPVT-7 (scsi) Disk /dev/sda: 500GB Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/4096B Partition Table: msdos Number Start End Size Type File system Flags 1 1049kB 106MB 105MB primary fat16 diag 2 106MB 15.8GB 15.7GB primary ntfs boot 3 15.8GB 266GB 251GB primary ntfs 4 266GB 500GB 234GB extended 5 266GB 269GB 2682MB logical ext4 7 269GB 270GB 524MB logical ext4 8 270GB 366GB 96.8GB logical lvm 6 366GB 370GB 3999MB logical linux-swap(v1) 9 370GB 500GB 130GB logical ext4
3. Create Primary Partition in Selected HDD Using mkpart
mkpart command is used to create either primary or logical partition with the START and END disk locations. The below example creates partition with size around 15GB. The START and END points passed to the mkpart command are in the units of MBs.
(parted) mkpart primary 106 16179
You can also enable boot option on a partition as shown below. Linux reserves 1-4 or 1-3 partition number for primary partition and the extended partition starts from number 5.
(parted) set 1 boot on
4. Create Logical Partition in Selected HDD Using mkpart
Use mkpart command to create a new partition of a specific size. This will create the partition of a specific type such as primary, logical or extended without creating the file system.
Before creating the partition, execute a print command to view the current layout.
(parted) print Model: ATA WDC WD5000BPVT-7 (scsi) Disk /dev/sda: 500GB Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/4096B Partition Table: msdos Number Start End Size Type File system Flags 1 1049kB 106MB 105MB primary fat16 diag 2 106MB 15.8GB 15.7GB primary ntfs boot 3 15.8GB 266GB 251GB primary ntfs 4 266GB 500GB 234GB extended 5 266GB 316GB 50.0GB logical ext4 6 316GB 324GB 7999MB logical linux-swap(v1) 7 324GB 344GB 20.0GB logical ext4 8 344GB 364GB 20.0GB logical ext2
Use mkpart to create a new logical partition with 127GB size as shown below.
(parted) mkpart logical 372737 500000
Execute the print command to view the new layout as shown below.
(parted) print Model: ATA WDC WD5000BPVT-7 (scsi) Disk /dev/sda: 500GB Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/4096B Partition Table: msdos Number Start End Size Type File system Flags 1 1049kB 106MB 105MB primary fat16 diag 2 106MB 15.8GB 15.7GB primary ntfs boot 3 15.8GB 266GB 251GB primary ntfs 4 266GB 500GB 234GB extended 5 266GB 316GB 50.0GB logical ext4 6 316GB 324GB 7999MB logical linux-swap(v1) 7 324GB 344GB 20.0GB logical ext4 8 344GB 364GB 20.0GB logical ext2 9 373GB 500GB 127GB logical (parted)
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