Linux Community Magazine

Is your current Linux drive partition structure not fulfilling storage requirements? Do you need to repartition your Linux disk? Linux enables you to do this using 'sfdisk' command-line utility. This tool has four uses: list hard drive partitions, size of particular partition, check partitions on hard disk, and repartition the drive. Before you proceed for the Linux hard drive repartitioning, you must create an absolute backup of your significant data on the hard drive. A minor mistake while repartitioning the Linux cdisk can lead to severe data loss. At this point, you must go for Linux data recovery if you do not have an updated backup.

You must keep in mind that sfdisk utility does not understand GPT (GUID Partition Table). It is not developed for the large Linux partitions. This Linux hard drive repartition utility has the following four invocations:

sfdisk -s: It provides the size information for all the hard disk partitions in blocks. This option is helpful in connection with other programs.

sfdisk -l: This is the second invocation of sfdisk utility. It lists all the partitions on your Linux hard disk. If you omit the device argument, partition on all Linux hard drives are listed.

sfdisk -V: This is the third invocation that applies various types of consistency checks to partition table on Linux hard drive. The option prints either complaints or 'OK'. You can use this option together with -l.

sfdisk: This is the fourth and final type of invocation that reads specification for desired partitioning of Linux hard disk from standard input and changes partition table on the drive. When the sfdisk tool determines that standard input is terminal, it becomes conversational, else it aborts with an error.

Before you apply the fourth invocation of sfdisk command on your Linux hard disk, you must create a complete backup of all your significant data on an external hard drive or other removable storage media. Backup helps you to prevent need of data recovery Linux solutions in case any failure occurs.

If the disk repartitioning process is interrupted due to power failure or system crash, entire hard drive becomes inaccessible and severe data loss situations occur. At this point, you need to use Linux drive recovery applications to ensure easy and safe recovery. The Linux drive recovery tools effectively handle all data loss situations.

Stellar Phoenix Linux data recovery is the most efficient and advanced utility to offer absolute recovery of all your valuable data. The software recovers data from all Ext4, Ext3, Ext2, FAT32, FAT16, and FAT12 file system volumes. It works well with all major distributions of Linux operating system including Red Hat, SUSE, Debian, and Mandriva.