Chapter 5. Managing Disk Storage
After you have installed your Red Hat Linux system, you may want to view the
existing partition table, change the size of the partitions, remove
partitions, or add partitions from free space or additional hard
drives. The utility parted allows you to perform these
tasks. This chapter discusses how to use parted to
perform file system tasks. Alternatively, you can use
fdisk to perform most of these tasks, excluding
resizing partitions. For more information on fdisk,
refer to man or info page for fdisk.
If you want to view the system's disk space usage or monitor the disk
space usage, refer to Section 26.3 File Systems.
You must have the parted package installed to use the
parted utility. To start parted, at
a shell prompt as root, type the command parted
/dev/hdb, where
/dev/hdb is the device name for the drive you
want to configure. You will see a (parted) prompt. Type
help to view a list of available commands.
If you want to create, remove, or resize a partition, the device can
not be in use (partitions can not be mounted, and swap space can not be
enabled). The easiest way to achieve this it to boot your system in rescue
mode. Refer to Chapter 9 Basic System Recovery for instructions on booting
into rescue mode. When prompted to mount the file system, select
Skip.
Alternately, if the drive does not contain any partitions in use, you can
unmount them with the umount command and turn off all
the swap space on the hard drive with the swapoff
command.
Table 5-1 contains a list of commonly used
parted commands. The sections that follow explain
some of them in more detail.
| Command | Description |
|---|
| check minor-num | Perform a simple check of the file system |
| cp from to | Copy file system from one partition to another;
from and
to are the minor numbers of the partitions |
| help | Display list of available commands |
| mklabel label | Create a disk label for the partition table |
| mkfs minor-num file-system-type | Create a file system of type
file-system-type |
| mkpart part-type
fs-type
start-mb end-mb | Make a partition without creating a new file system |
| mkpartfs part-type
fs-type
start-mb end-mb | Make a partition and create the specified file system |
| move minor-num
start-mb end-mb | Move the partition |
| print | Display the partition table |
| quit | Quit parted |
| resize minor-num
start-mb end-mb | Resize the partition from
start-mb to end-mb |
| rm minor-num | Remove the partition |
| select device | Select a different device to configure |
| set minor-num
flag state | Set the flag on a partition;
state is either on or off |
Table 5-1. parted commands
5.1. Viewing the Partition Table
After starting parted, type the following command to
view the partition table:
A table similar to the following will appear:
Disk geometry for /dev/hda: 0.000-9765.492 megabytes
Disk label type: msdos
Minor Start End Type Filesystem Flags
1 0.031 101.975 primary ext3 boot
2 101.975 611.850 primary linux-swap
3 611.851 760.891 primary ext3
4 760.891 9758.232 extended lba
5 760.922 9758.232 logical ext3 |
The first line displays the size of the disk, the second line displays
the disk label type, and the remaining output shows the partition
table. In the partition table, the Minor number is
the partition number. For example, the partition with minor number 1
corresponds to /dev/hda1. The
Start and End values are in
megabytes. The Type is one of primary, extended, or
logical. The Filesystem is the file system type,
which can be one of ext2, ext3, FAT, hfs, jfs, linux-swap, ntfs,
reiserfs, hp-ufs, sun-ufs, or xfs. The Flags column
lists the flags set for the partition. Available flags are boot, root,
swap, hidden, raid, lvm, or lba.
 | Tip |
|---|
| | To select a different device without having to restart
parted, use the select command
followed by the device name such as
/dev/hdb. Then, you can view its partition table
or configure it.
|
