Explanation: Fdisk and Cfdisk Disk Partitioners.
There are two broad types of disk partitioning: destructive and non-destructive. This blog entry deals with destructive partitioners. I would have preferred to make a HOW TO out of this entry but I don’t have a dev system that I can wipe right now, so I’m just going to take a look at fdisk and cfdisk instead.
Destructive partitioners wipe everything on the disk when changes are written. Remember that.
Two partitioning programs that are present on many distros are fdisk and cfdisk. They are both command-line utilities, and out of the two I prefer cfdisk. Cfdisk looks almost identical to the old MSDOS fdisk application which may be why I prefer it. Fdisk, on the oter hand, may appeal to the more ‘hackerish’ amongst us.
Both require root access to run, although the errors that they display when run as a non-root user don’t exactly tell you this. If you attempt to run either as a non-root user, you will be old that the application cannot open the disk.
To run cfdisk, simply type cfdisk. To run fdisk, you must specify the device that you wish to operate on such as fdisk /dev/hda. Keep in mind that hda is a device whereas hda1 is a partition.
Cfdisk’s interface is rather intuitive if you’ve paritioned a disk before, but fdisk’s interface is a little more cryptic. Within fdisk, press ‘m’ for help (yes, m. Not h).
I don’t advise running either application on live system because one simple keystoke (especially in fdisk) can wipe your entire disk and render your machine useless.
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