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The parted command

The parted command is used to manage hard disk partitions on Linux. It can be used to add, delete, shrink and extend disk partitions along with the file systems located on them. You will need root access to the system to run parted commands.

NOTE: Parted writes the changes immediately to your disk, be careful when you are modifying the disk partitions.

Examples:

  1. Displays partition layout of all block devices: sudo parted -l

  2. Display partition table of a specific disk sudo parted disk print

Examples of disk are /dev/sda, /dev/sdb

  1. Create a new disk label of label-type for a specific disk sudo parted mklabel disk label-type

label-type can take values "aix", "amiga", "bsd", "dvh", "gpt", "loop", "mac", "msdos", "pc98", or "sun"

  1. Create a new partition in a specific disk of type part-time, file system is fs-type and of size size Mb. sudo parted disk mkpart part-time fs-type 1 size

part-time can take values "primary", "logical", "extended".
fs-type is optional. It can take values "btrfs", "ext2", "ext3", "ext4", "fat16", "fat32", "hfs", "hfs+", "linux-swap", "ntfs", "reiserfs", "udf", or "xfs"
size has to less than the total size of the specified disk. To create a partition of size 50Mb, will take the value of 50

  1. parted can also be run in an interactive format. Operations to manage the disk partitions can be performed by entering appropriate commands in the interactive session. help command in the interactive session shows a list of all possible disk management operations which can be performed. ``` $ sudo parted GNU Parted 3.3 Using /dev/sda Welcome to GNU Parted! Type 'help' to view a list of commands. (parted) print # prints the partition table of the default selected disk - /dev/sda
    Model: ATA VBOX HARDDISK (scsi) Disk /dev/sda: 53.7GB Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/512B Partition Table: msdos Disk Flags:

    Number Start End Size Type File system Flags 1 1049kB 53.7GB 53.7GB primary ext4 boot

    (parted) select /dev/sdb # change the current disk on which operations have to be performed
    Using /dev/sdb (parted) quit # exit the interactive session ```

Syntax Forms:

parted [options] [device [command [options...]...]]

Options:

Short Flag Long Flag Description
-h –help displays a help message listing all possible commands [options]
-l –list lists partition layout on all block devices
-m –machine displays machine parseable output
-v –version displays the version
-a –align set alignment type for newly created partition. It can take the following values:
none: Use the minimum alignment allowed by the disk type
cylinder: Align partitions to cylinders
minimal: Use minimum alignment as given by the disk topology information
optimal: Use optimum alignment as given by the disk topology information
Last update: 2022-05-12
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