Copyright © 1999–2023 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.3 or any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no Invariant Sections, with no Front-Cover Texts, and with no Back-Cover Texts. A copy of the license is included in the section entitled “GNU Free Documentation License”.
This file documents the use of GNU Parted, a program for creating and manipulating partition tables.
This document applies roughly to version 3.6 of GNU Parted.
The original version was written by Andrew Clausen in text format. Richard M. Kreuter translated it into Texinfo format in 2002, to be heavily edited by Leslie P. Polzer in 2006.
GNU Parted is a program for creating and manipulating partition tables.
This documentation is written with the assumption that the reader has some understanding of partitioning and file systems.
GNU Parted was designed to minimize the chance of data loss. For example, it was designed to avoid data loss during interruptions (like power failure) and performs many safety checks. However, there could be bugs in GNU Parted, so you should back up your important files before running Parted.
The GNU Parted homepage is https://www.gnu.org/software/parted. The library and frontend themselves can be downloaded from https://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/parted. You can also find a listing of mailing lists, notes for contributing and more useful information on the web site.
Please send bug reports to bug-parted@gnu.org. When sending bug reports, please include the version of GNU Parted. Please include the output from these commands (for disk /dev/hda):
# parted /dev/hda unit s print free
Feel free to ask for help on this list — just check that your question isn’t answered here first. If you don’t understand the documentation, please tell us, so we can explain it better. General philosophy is: if you need to ask for help, then something needs to be fixed so you (and others) don’t need to ask for help.
Also, we’d love to hear your ideas :-)
If you’re installing or compiling Parted yourself, you’ll need to have some other programs installed. If you are compiling Parted, you will need both the normal and devel packages of these programs installed:
https://git.savannah.gnu.org/gitweb/?p=parted.git
or using git (See the README-hacking instructions):
http://web.mit.edu/tytso/www/linux/e2fsprogs.html
If you want to compile Parted and e2fsprogs, note that you will need to make install and make install-libs e2fsprogs.
https://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/readline
If you are compiling Parted, and you don’t have readline, you can
disable Parted’s readline support with the --disable-readline
option for configure
.
Hopefully, this list will grow a lot. If you do not have one of these platforms, then you can use a rescue disk and a static binary of GNU Parted.
Linux versions 2.0 and up, on Alpha, x86 PCs, PC98, Macintosh PowerPC, Sun hardware.
GNU Parted is free software, covered by the GNU General Public License Version 3, or (at your option) any later version. This should have been included with the Parted distribution, in the COPYING file. If not, see <http://www.gnu.org/licenses/>.
Libparted is considered part of GNU Parted. It is covered by the GNU General Public License. It is NOT released under the GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL).
If you want to compile GNU Parted, this is generally done with:
$ ./configure $ make
However, there are a few options for configure
:
--without-readline
turns off use of readline. This is useful for making rescue disks, etc., where few libraries are available.
--disable-debug
don’t include assertions
--disable-nls
turns off native language support. This is useful for use with old versions of glibc, or a trimmed down version of glibc suitable for rescue disks.
--disable-shared
turns off shared libraries. This may be necessary for use with old versions of GNU libc, if you get a compile error about a “spilled register”. Also useful for boot/rescue disks.
--enable-discover-only
support only reading/probing (reduces size considerably)
--enable-mtrace
enable malloc() debugging
--enable-read-only
disable writing (for debugging)
If you want to run GNU Parted on a machine without GNU/Linux installed, or you want to modify a root or boot partition, use GParted Live: https://gparted.org/livecd.php.
Partitioning is the process of dividing a storage device into local sections, called partitions, which help organize multiple filesystems and their associated operating systems.
A storage device presents itself as a sequence of bytes, numbered starting from zero and increasing until the maximum capacity of the device is reached. Bytes are normally read and written a sector at a time, rather than individually. Each sector contains a fixed number of bytes, with the number determined by the device.
+------------------------------------------------------------+ | storage device with no partitions | +------------------------------------------------------------+ 0 start end
In order to store multiple filesystems, a storage device can be divided up in to multiple partitions. Each partition can be thought of as an area which contains a real filesystem inside of it. To show where these partitions are on the device a small table is written at the start, shown as PT in the diagram below. This table is called a partition table, or disklabel, and also stores the type of each partition and some flags.
+--+---------------+----------------+------------------------+ |PT| Partition 1 | Partition 2 | Partition 3 | +--+---------------+----------------+------------------------+ 0 start end
Parted has two modes: command line and interactive. Parted should always be started with:
# parted device
where device is the hard disk device to edit. (If you’re lazy and omit the DEVICE argument, Parted will attempt to guess which device you want.)
In command line mode, this is followed by one or more commands. For example:
# parted /dev/sda mklabel gpt mkpart P1 ext3 1MiB 8MiB
Options (like --help) can only be specified on the command line.
In interactive mode, commands are entered one at a time at a prompt, and modify the disk immediately. For example:
(parted) mklabel gpt (parted) mkpart P1 ext3 1MiB 8MiB
Unambiguous abbreviations are allowed. For example, you can type “p” instead of “print”, and “u” instead of “units”. Commands can be typed either in English, or your native language (if your language has been translated). This may create ambiguities. Commands are case-insensitive.
Numbers indicating partition locations can be whole numbers or decimals. The suffix selects the unit, which may be one of those described in unit, except CHS and compact. If no suffix is given, then the default unit is assumed. Negative numbers count back from the end of the disk, with “-1s” indicating the sector at the end of the disk. Parted will compute sensible ranges for the locations you specify (e.g. a range of +/- 500 MB when you specify the location in “G”). Use the sector unit “s” to specify exact locations. With parted-2.4 and newer, IEC binary units like “MiB”, “GiB”, “TiB”, etc., specify exact locations as well. See IEC binary units.
If you don’t give a parameter to a command, Parted will prompt you for it. For example:
(parted) mklabel New disk label type? gpt
Parted will always warn you before doing something that is potentially dangerous, unless the command is one of those that is inherently dangerous (viz., rm, mklabel and mkpart). Since many partitioning systems have complicated constraints, Parted will usually do something slightly different to what you asked. (For example, create a partition starting at 10.352Mb, not 10.4Mb) If the calculated values differ too much, Parted will ask you for confirmation.
When invoked from the command line, Parted supports the following syntax:
# parted [option] device [command [argument]]
Available options and commands follow. For detailed explanations of the use of Parted commands, see Parted Session Commands. Options begin with a hyphen, commands do not:
Options:
display a help message
lists partition layout on all block devices
display output in machine parseable format
display output in JSON format
never prompt the user
automatically answer exceptions with "fix" in script mode, which is useful for: GPT header not including full disk size; moving the backup GPT table to the end of the disk; MAC fix missing partition map entry; etc.
Set alignment for newly created partitions, valid alignment types are: none, cylinder, minimal and optimal.
display the version
GNU Parted provides the following commands:
Note that after version 2.4, the following commands were removed: check, cp, mkfs, mkpartfs, move, resize.
Determine whether the starting sector of partition n meets the disk’s selected alignment criteria. align-type must be ‘minimal’, ‘optimal’ or an abbreviation. When in script mode, if the partition does not meet the alignment requirement, exit with status 1; otherwise (including on older kernels for which alignment data is not available), continue processing any remaining commands. Without --script, print either ‘N aligned’ or ‘N not aligned’.
Example:
(parted) align-check minimal 1 1 aligned
Changes a flag on the disk. A flag can be either “on” or “off”. Some or all of these flags will be available, depending on what disk label you are using:
(GPT) - this flag enables the boot flag on the GPT’s protective MBR partition.
The disk’s flags are displayed by the print command on the "Disk Flags:" line. They are also output as the last field of the disk information in machine mode.
(parted) disk_set pmbr_boot on
Set the PMBR’s boot flag.
Prints general help, or help on command.
Example:
(parted) help mklabel
Print help for the mklabel command.
Creates a new disk label, of type label-type. The new disk label will have no partitions. This command (normally) won’t technically destroy your data, but it will make it basically unusable, and you will need to use the rescue command (see Related information) to recover any partitions. Parted works on all partition tables. 1
label-type must be one of these supported disk labels:
Example:
(parted) mklabel msdos
Create an MS-DOS disk label. This is still the most common disk label for PCs.
Creates a new partition, without creating a new file system on that partition. This is useful for creating partitions for file systems (or LVM, etc.) that Parted doesn’t support. You may specify a file system type, to set the appropriate partition code in the partition table for the new partition. fs-type is required for data partitions (i.e., non-extended partitions). start and end are the offset from the beginning of the disk, that is, the “distance” from the start of the disk.
part-type is one of ‘primary’, ‘extended’ or ‘logical’, and may be specified only with ‘msdos’ or ‘dvh’ partition tables. A name must be specified for a ‘gpt’ partition table. Neither part-type nor name may be used with a ‘sun’ partition table.
fs-type must be one of these supported file systems:
For example, the following creates a logical partition that will contain an ext2 file system. The partition will start at the beginning of the disk, and end 692.1 megabytes into the disk.
(parted) mkpart logical 0.0 692.1
Now, we will show how to partition a low-end flash device (“low-end”, as of 2011/2012). For such devices, you should use 4MiB-aligned partitions2. This command creates a tiny place-holder partition at the beginning, and then uses all remaining space to create the partition you’ll actually use:
$ parted -s /dev/sdX -- mklabel msdos \ mkpart primary fat32 64s 4MiB \ mkpart primary fat32 4MiB -1s
Note the use of ‘--’, to prevent the following ‘-1s’ last-sector indicator from being interpreted as an invalid command-line option. The above creates two empty partitions. The first is unaligned and tiny, with length less than 4MiB. The second partition starts precisely at the 4MiB mark and extends to the end of the device.
The next step is typically to create a file system in the second partition:
$ mkfs.vfat /dev/sdX2
Sets the name for the partition number (GPT, Mac, MIPS and PC98 only). The name can be placed in quotes. And depending on the shell may need to also be wrapped in single quotes so that the shell doesn’t strip off the double quotes.
Example:
(parted) name 2 'Secret Documents'
Set the name of partition 2 to ‘Secret Documents’.
Displays the partition table on the device parted is editing, or detailed information about a particular partition.
print-type is optional, and can be one of ‘devices’, ‘free’, ‘list’, or ‘all’.
devices
display all active block devices
free
display information about free unpartitioned space on the current block device
list, all
display the partition tables of all active block devices
Example:
(parted) print Model: ATA Samsung SSD 850 (scsi) Disk /dev/sda: 2684MB Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/512B Partition Table: msdos Disk Flags: Number Start End Size Type File system Flags 1 1049kB 1000MB 999MB primary boot, lba 2 1000MB 2300MB 1299MB primary ext2 lba 3 2300MB 2500MB 200MB primary linux-swap(v1) lba (parted) print free Model: ATA Samsung SSD 850 (scsi) Disk /dev/sda: 2684MB Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/512B Partition Table: msdos Disk Flags: Number Start End Size Type File system Flags 16.4kB 1049kB 1032kB Free Space 1 1049kB 1000MB 999MB primary boot, lba 2 1000MB 2300MB 1299MB primary ext2 lba 3 2300MB 2500MB 200MB primary linux-swap(v1) lba 2500MB 2684MB 185MB Free Space
Quits Parted.
It is only after Parted exits that the Linux kernel knows about the changes Parted has made to the disks. However, the changes caused by typing your commands will probably be made to the disk immediately after typing a command. However, the operating system’s cache and the disk’s hardware cache may delay this.
Rescue a lost partition that used to be located approximately between start and end. If such a partition is found, Parted will ask you if you want to create a partition for it. This is useful if you accidentally deleted a partition with parted’s rm command, for example.
Example:
(parted) print
Model: ATA Samsung SSD 850 (scsi) Disk /dev/sda: 2684MB Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/512B Partition Table: msdos Disk Flags: Number Start End Size Type File system Flags 1 1049kB 1000MB 999MB primary boot, lba 2 1000MB 2300MB 1299MB primary ext4 lba
(parted) rm Partition number? 2 (parted) print
Model: ATA Samsung SSD 850 (scsi) Disk /dev/sda: 2684MB Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/512B Partition Table: msdos Disk Flags: Number Start End Size Type File system Flags 1 1049kB 1000MB 999MB primary boot, lba
OUCH! We deleted our ext4 partition!!! Parted comes to the rescue...
(parted) rescue Start? 1000 End? 2684 Information: A ext4 primary partition was found at 1000MB -> 2300MB. Do you want to add it to the partition table? Yes/No/Cancel? y (parted) print
Model: ATA Samsung SSD 850 (scsi) Disk /dev/sda: 2684MB Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/512B Partition Table: msdos Disk Flags: Number Start End Size Type File system Flags 1 1049kB 1000MB 999MB primary boot, lba 2 1000MB 2300MB 1299MB primary ext4 lba
It’s back! :)
Moves the end position of partition number. Note that this
does not modify any filesystem present in the partition. If you wish to
do this, you will need to use external tools, such as resize2fs
.
When growing a partition you will want to grow the filesystem afterwards, but when shrinking, you need to shrink the filesystem before the partition.
Removes the partition with number number. If you accidentally delete a partition with this command, use see rescue to recover it. Also, you can use the gpart program (see Related information) to recover damaged disk labels.
Note for msdos disk labels: if you delete a logical partition, all logical partitions with a larger partition number will be renumbered. For example, if you delete a logical partition with a partition number of 6, then logical partitions that were number 7, 8 and 9 would be renumbered to 6, 7 and 8 respectively. This means, for example, that you have to update /etc/fstab on GNU/Linux systems.
Example:
(parted) rm 3
Remove partition 3.
Selects the device, device, for Parted to edit. The device can be a Linux hard disk device, a partition, a software RAID device, LVM logical volume, or disk image file.
Example:
(parted) select /dev/hdb
Select /dev/hdb (the slave device on the first ide controller on Linux) as the device to edit.
Changes a flag on the partition with number number. A flag can be either “on” or “off”. Some or all of these flags will be available, depending on what disk label you are using:
(GPT) - Enable this to record that the selected partition is a GRUB BIOS partition.
(GPT) - this flag is used to tell special purpose software that the GPT partition may be bootable.
(MS-DOS, GPT) - Enable this to indicate that the selected partition is a Linux Boot Loader Specification compatible /boot partition.
(Mac, MS-DOS, PC98) - should be enabled if you want to boot off the partition. The semantics vary between disk labels. For MS-DOS disk labels, only one partition can be bootable. If you are installing LILO on a partition that partition must be bootable. For PC98 disk labels, all ext2 partitions must be bootable (this is enforced by Parted).
(GPT) - This flag identifies partitions that contain Microsoft filesystems (NTFS or FAT). It may optionally be set on Linux filesystems to mimic the type of configuration created by parted 3.0 and earlier, in which a separate Linux filesystem type code was not available on GPT disks. This flag can only be removed within parted by replacing it with a competing flag, such as boot or msftres.
(MS-DOS,GPT) - This flag identifies a "Microsoft Reserved" partition, which is used by Windows. Note that this flag should not normally be set on Windows filesystem partitions (those that contain NTFS or FAT filesystems).
(MS-DOS, GPT) - this flag identifies an Intel Rapid Start Technology partition.
(MS-DOS, GPT) - this flag identifies a UEFI System Partition. On GPT it is an alias for boot.
(GPT) - this flag indicates a partition that can be used with the Chrome OS bootloader and verified boot implementation.
(MS-DOS) - this flag can be enabled to tell MS DOS, MS Windows 9x and MS Windows ME based operating systems to use Linear (LBA) mode.
(Mac) - this flag should be enabled if the partition is the root device to be used by Linux.
(GPT) - Enable this to indicate that the selected partition is a Linux /home partition.
(MS-DOS, GPT, Mac) - this flag should be enabled if the partition is the swap device to be used by Linux.
(MS-DOS, PC98) - this flag can be enabled to hide partitions from Microsoft operating systems.
(MS-DOS) - this flag can be enabled to tell linux the partition is a software RAID partition.
(MS-DOS) - this flag can be enabled to tell linux the partition is a physical volume.
(MS-DOS) - this flag can be enabled so that the partition can be used by the Linux/PA-RISC boot loader, palo.
(MS-DOS, GPT) - this flag can be enabled so that the partition can be used as a PReP boot partition on PowerPC PReP or IBM RS6K/CHRP hardware.
(MS-DOS) - Enable this to indicate that a partition can be used as a diagnostics / recovery partition.
The print command displays all enabled flags for each partition.
Example:
(parted) set 1 boot on
Set the ‘boot’ flag on partition 1.
On MS-DOS set the type-id aka partition id to id on partition number. The id is a value between 0x01 and 0xff, e.g. the ID for Linux is 0x83. A list with some IDs is available at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Partition_type.
On GPT set the type-uuid to uuid on partition number. E.g. the UUID for Linux is 0fc63daf-8483-4772-8e79-3d69d8477de4. A list with some UUIDs is availabe at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GUID_Partition_Table.
Selects the current default unit that Parted will use to display locations and capacities on the disk and to interpret those given by the user if they are not suffixed by an unit.
unit may be one of:
sector (n bytes depending on the sector size, often 512)
byte
kibibyte (1024 bytes)
mebibyte (1048576 bytes)
gibibyte (1073741824 bytes)
tebibyte (1099511627776 bytes)
kilobyte (1000 bytes)
megabyte (1000000 bytes)
gigabyte (1000000000 bytes)
terabyte (1000000000000 bytes)
percentage of the device (between 0 and 100)
cylinders (related to the BIOS CHS geometry)
cylinders, heads, sectors addressing (related to the BIOS CHS geometry)
This is a special unit that defaults to megabytes for input, and picks a unit that gives a compact human readable representation for output.
The default unit apply only for the output and when no unit is specified after an input number. Input numbers can be followed by an unit (without any space or other character between them), in which case this unit apply instead of the default unit for this particular number, but CHS and cylinder units are not supported as a suffix. If no suffix is given, then the default unit is assumed. Parted will compute sensible ranges for the locations you specify (e.g., a range of +/- 500 MB when you specify the location in “G”, and a range of +/- 500 KB when you specify the location in “M”) and will select the nearest location in this range from the one you wrote that satisfies constraints from both the operation, the filesystem being worked on, the disk label, other partitions and so on. Use the sector unit “s” to specify exact locations (if they do not satisfy all constraints, Parted will ask you for the nearest solution). Note that negative numbers count back from the end of the disk, with “-1s” pointing to the last sector of the disk.
Note that as of parted-2.4, when you specify start and/or end values using IEC binary units like “MiB”, “GiB”, “TiB”, etc., parted treats those values as exact, and equivalent to the same number specified in bytes (i.e., with the “B” suffix), in that it provides no “helpful” range of sloppiness. Contrast that with a partition start request of “4GB”, which may actually resolve to some sector up to 500MB before or after that point. Thus, when creating a partition, you should prefer to specify units of bytes (“B”), sectors (“s”), or IEC binary units like “MiB”, but not “MB”, “GB”, etc.
Example:
(parted) unit compact (parted) print Disk geometry for /dev/hda: 0kB - 123GB Disk label type: msdos Number Start End Size Type File system Flags 1 32kB 1078MB 1077MB primary reiserfs boot 2 1078MB 2155MB 1078MB primary linux-swap 3 2155MB 123GB 121GB extended 5 2155MB 7452MB 5297MB logical reiserfs
(parted) unit chs print Disk geometry for /dev/hda: 0,0,0 - 14946,225,62 BIOS cylinder,head,sector geometry: 14946,255,63. Each cylinder is 8225kB. Disk label type: msdos Number Start End Type File system Flags 1 0,1,0 130,254,62 primary reiserfs boot 2 131,0,0 261,254,62 primary linux-swap 3 262,0,0 14945,254,62 extended 5 262,2,0 905,254,62 logical reiserfs
(parted) unit mb print Disk geometry for /dev/hda: 0MB - 122942MB Disk label type: msdos Number Start End Size Type File system Flags 1 0MB 1078MB 1077MB primary reiserfs boot 2 1078MB 2155MB 1078MB primary linux-swap 3 2155MB 122935MB 120780MB extended 5 2155MB 7452MB 5297MB logical reiserfs
If you want to find out more information, please see the GNU Parted web site.
These files in the Parted distribution contain further information:
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Initial Texinfo formatting by Richard M. Kreuter, 2002.
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Everyone seems to have a different word for “disk label” — these are all the same thing: partition table, partition map.
Cheap flash drives will be with us for a long time to come, and, for them, 1MiB alignment is not enough. Use at least 4MiB-aligned partitions. For details, see Arnd Bergman’s article, http://lwn.net/Articles/428584/ and its many comments.