Recipe 5.5. Viewing Drive Partitions with fdisk
5.5.1 Problem
You need to see all the
partitions on a hard drive or drives. You may need to see exactly how
space is allocated on the disk drives; you may want to
"reclaim" some old Windows
partitions, convert an unused partition to swap space, or find the
/dev number for a partition.
fdisk also tells you the filesystem on the
partition, and shows any free space on a drive.
5.5.2 Solution
Use fdisk. To display all partitions on all hard
drives, use:
# /sbin/fdisk -l
Disk /dev/hda: 20.5 GB, 20576747520 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 2501 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/hda1 * 1 893 7172991 7 HPFS/NTFS
/dev/hda2 894 1033 1124550 c W95 FAT32 (LBA)
/dev/hda4 1034 2501 11791710 f W95 Ext'd (LBA)
/dev/hda5 2437 2501 522081 82 Linux swap
/dev/hda6 1034 1670 5116639+ 83 Linux
/dev/hda7 1671 2436 6152863+ 83 Linux
Disk /dev/hdb: 40.0 GB, 40020664320 bytes
16 heads, 63 sectors/track, 77545 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 1008 * 512 = 516096 bytes
Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/hdb1 * 1 4162 2097616+ 82 Linux swap
/dev/hdb2 4163 77545 36985032 83 Linux
Partition table entries are not in disk order
To display the partition table on a selected drive, use:
# /sbin/fdisk -l /dev/hda
Disk /dev/hda: 20.5 GB, 20576747520 bytesDisk /dev/hda: 20.5 GB, 20576747520 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 2501 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
...
5.5.3 Discussion
You can also see what type of filesystem is located on any partition.
In this example, you see two different types of Windows filesystems
(HPFS/NTFS, FAT32) and a Windows extended partition on which some
Linux filesystems and a swap partition have been built.
5.5.4 See Also
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