Fdisk / gdisk / sfdisk / sgdisk / parted

The familie of fdisk programs are used to handle partition tables.

• fdisk original DOS partition table program, linux version is called the same
• cfdisk has a nice interface, but does not align partitions to 1MB
• sfdisk works well for MBR formatted hard disks
• sgdisk does the same as sfdisk but is for GPT formatted hard disks
• parted is a very powerful tool to work and fix partition tables
• gparted is the graphical version of parted and exists also as bootable CD, http://gparted.org/livecd.php
• diskpart is the successor of fdisk on Windows 2000 onward

Backup a partition table

   sfdisk -d /dev/sda > backup.sfdisk # for MBR
   sgdisk --backup=backup.sgdisk /dev/sda # for GPT

Copy a partition table

   sfdisk -d /dev/sda | sfdisk /dev/sdb # for MBR
   sgdisk --backup=tmp.sgdisk /dev/sda # for GPT
   sgdisk --load-backup=tmp.sgdisk /dev/sdb
   sgdisk -G /dev/sdb # note GPT uuid must be unique

Restore a partition table

   sfdisk -f /dev/sdb < backup.sfdisk # for MBR
   # -f force
   sgdisk --load-backup=backup.sgdisk /dev/sdb # for GPT