167 lines
5.5 KiB
Groff
167 lines
5.5 KiB
Groff
.\" Copyright 1992, 1993 Rickard E. Faith (faith@cs.unc.edu)
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.\" May be distributed under the GNU General Public License
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.TH FDISK 8 "Tue Mar 22 01:00:00 1994" "Linux 1.0" "Linux Programmer's Manual"
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.SH NAME
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fdisk \- Partition table manipulator for Linux
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.SH SYNOPSIS
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.B fdisk
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.B "[ \-l ] [ \-v ] [ \-s partition] ["
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device
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.B ]
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.SH DESCRIPTION
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.B fdisk
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is a menu driven program for manipulation of the hard disk partition table.
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The
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.I device
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is usually one of the following:
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.sp
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.nf
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.RS
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/dev/hda
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/dev/hdb
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/dev/sda
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/dev/sdb
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.RE
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.fi
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The
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.I partition
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is a
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.I device
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name followed by a partition number. For example,
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.B /dev/hda1
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is the first partition on the first hard disk in the system.
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If possible,
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.B fdisk
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will obtain the disk geometry automatically. This is
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.I not
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necessarily the
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.I physical
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disk geometry, but is the disk geometry that MS-DOS uses for the partition
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table. If
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.B fdisk
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warns you that you need to set the disk geometry, please believe this
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statement, and set the geometry. This should only be necessary with
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certain SCSI host adapters (the drivers for which are rapidly being
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modified to provide geometry information automatically).
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Whenever a partition table is printed out, a consistency check is performed
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on the partition table entries. This check verifies that the physical and
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logical start and end points are identical, and that the partition starts
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and ends on a cylinder boundary (except for the first partition).
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Old versions of fdisk (all versions prior to 1.1r [including 0.93])
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incorrectly mapped the cylinder/head/sector specification onto absolute
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sectors. This may result in the first partition on a drive failing the
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consistency check. If you use LILO to boot, this situation can be ignored.
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However, there are reports that the OS/2 boot manager will not boot a
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partition with inconsistent data.
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Some versions of MS-DOS create a first partition which does not begin
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on a cylinder boundary, but on sector 2 of the first cylinder.
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Partitions beginning in cylinder 1 cannot begin on a cylinder boundary, but
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this is unlikely to cause difficulty unless you have OS/2 on your machine.
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In version 1.1r, a BLKRRPART ioctl() is performed before exiting when the
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partition table is updated. This is primarily to ensure that removable
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SCSI disks have their partition table information updated. If the kernel
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does not update its partition table information, fdisk warns you to
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reboot. If you do not reboot your system after receiving such a warning,
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you may lose or corrupt the data on the disk. Sometimes BLKRRPART fails
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silently, when installing Linux, you should
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.I always
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reboot after editing the partition table.
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.SH "DOS 6.x WARNING"
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The DOS 6.x FORMAT command looks for some information in the first
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sector of the data area of the partition, and treats this information
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as more reliable than the information in the partition table. DOS
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FORMAT expects DOS FDISK to clear the first 512 bytes of the data area
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of a partition whenever a size change occurs. DOS FORMAT will look at
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this extra information even if the /U flag is given -- we consider
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this a bug in DOS FORMAT and DOS FDISK.
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The bottom line is that if you use cfdisk or fdisk to change the size of a
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DOS partition table entry, then you must also use
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.B dd
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to zero the first 512 bytes of that partition before using DOS FORMAT to
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format the partition. For example, if you were using cfdisk to make a DOS
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partition table entry for /dev/hda1, then (after exiting fdisk or cfdisk
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and rebooting Linux so that the partition table information is valid) you
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would use the command "dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda1 bs=512 count=1" to zero
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the first 512 bytes of the partition.
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.B BE EXTREMELY CAREFUL
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if you use the
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.B dd
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command, since a small typo can make all of the data on your disk useless.
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.B BE EXTREMELY CAREFUL
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if you use the
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.B dd
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command, since a small typo can make all of the data on your disk useless.
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For best resutls, you should always use an OS-specific partition table
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program. For example, you should make DOS partitions with the DOS FDISK
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program and Linux partitions with the Linux fdisk or Linux cfdisk program.
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.SH OPTIONS
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.TP
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.B \-v
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Prints version number of
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.B fdisk
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program.
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.TP
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.B \-l
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Lists the partition tables for
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.BR /dev/hda ,
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.BR /dev/hdb ,
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.BR /dev/sda ,
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.BR /dev/sdb ,
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.BR /dev/sdc ,
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.BR /dev/sdd ,
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.BR /dev/sde ,
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.BR /dev/sdf ,
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.BR /dev/sdg ,
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.BR /dev/sdh ,
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and then exits.
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.TP
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.BI \-s partition
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If the
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.I partition
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is not a DOS partition (i.e., the partition id is greater than 10), then
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the
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.I size
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of that partition is printed on the standard output. This value is
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normally used as an argument to the
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.BR mkfs (8)
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program to specify the size of the partition which will be formatted.
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.SH BUGS
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Although this man page (written by faith@cs.unc.edu) is poor, there is
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.I excellent
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documentation in the README.fdisk file (written by LeBlanc@mcc.ac.uk) that
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should always be with the fdisk distribution. If you cannot find this file
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in the
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.I util-linux-*
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directory or with the
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.I fdisk.c
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source file, then you should write to the distributor of your version of
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.B fdisk
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and complain that you do not have all of the available documentation.
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.SH AUTHOR
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A. V. Le Blanc (LeBlanc@mcc.ac.uk)
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.br
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v1.0r: SCSI and extfs support added by Rik Faith (faith@cs.unc.edu)
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.br
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v1.1r: Bug fixes and enhancements by Rik Faith (faith@cs.unc.edu), with
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special thanks to Michael Bischoff (i1041905@ws.rz.tu-bs.de or
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mbi@mo.math.nat.tu-bs.de).
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.br
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v1.3: Latest enhancements and bug fixes by A. V. Le Blanc, including the
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addition of the
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.B \-s
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option.
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.bt
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v2.0: Disks larger than 2GB are now fully supported, thanks to Remy Card's
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llseek support.
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