fdisk - you can lose your disk

Hi All,

fdisk is a command line partition tool for *nix systems.

The fdisk tool is the default tool even till today in many UNIX and LINUX distributions. For ex: freebsd, netbsd, openbsd and Slackware till 12.0 versions.

Ok so what is the big deal using fdisk?

Though fdisk is a wonderful tool - but if the user does not know its options - the probability of losing all the data or even the full partitions of the disk is very high.

One such problem this post discusses is:

fdisk shows the size of all partitions by default in bytes.

If a user plans to install a new distro onto a partition - first thing after backup of data is to know its exact size.

But knowing the partition size in a hard disk when the tool shows in bytes is a pain....

Trying to understand 100 GB is how much of bytes could be simple but indeed calculation to that extent is not required. Also when the user want to resize that 100Gb into 40 GB 2 partitions - then doing everything wrt bytes is a task better not to attempt!!!

Solution:

By pressing Z key in fdisk - fdisk toggles b/w different file sizes. So after bytes, the same partition is shown wrt KB, MB and GB when Z key is used (3 times)

Hope this helped :)

Thanks & enjoy,
Ananth S Gouri