parted: mkpart

1 
1 2.4.5 mkpart
1 ------------
1 
1  -- Command: mkpart [PART-TYPE NAME FS-TYPE] START END
1 
1      Creates a new partition, _without_ creating a new file system on
1      that partition.  This is useful for creating partitions for file
1      systems (or LVM, etc.)  that Parted doesn't support.  You may
1      specify a file system type, to set the appropriate partition code
1      in the partition table for the new partition.  FS-TYPE is required
1      for data partitions (i.e., non-extended partitions).  START and END
1      are the offset from the beginning of the disk, that is, the
1      "distance" from the start of the disk.
1 
1      PART-TYPE is one of 'primary', 'extended' or 'logical', and may be
1      specified only with 'msdos' or 'dvh' partition tables.  A NAME must
1      be specified for a 'gpt' partition table.  Neither PART-TYPE nor
1      NAME may be used with a 'sun' partition table.
1 
1      FS-TYPE must be one of these supported file systems:
1         * ext2
1         * fat16, fat32
1         * hfs, hfs+, hfsx
1         * linux-swap
1         * NTFS
1         * reiserfs
1         * ufs
1         * btrfs
1 
1      For example, the following creates a logical partition that will
1      contain an ext2 file system.  The partition will start at the
1      beginning of the disk, and end 692.1 megabytes into the disk.
1 
1           (parted) mkpart logical 0.0 692.1
1 
1      Now, we will show how to partition a low-end flash device
1      ("low-end", as of 2011/2012).  For such devices, you should use
1      4MiB-aligned partitions(1).  This command creates a tiny
1      place-holder partition at the beginning, and then uses all
1      remaining space to create the partition you'll actually use:
1 
1           $ parted -s /dev/sdX -- mklabel msdos \
1               mkpart primary fat32 64s 4MiB \
1               mkpart primary fat32 4MiB -1s
1 
1      Note the use of '--', to prevent the following '-1s' last-sector
1      indicator from being interpreted as an invalid command-line option.
1      The above creates two empty partitions.  The first is unaligned and
1      tiny, with length less than 4MiB. The second partition starts
1      precisely at the 4MiB mark and extends to the end of the device.
1 
1      The next step is typically to create a file system in the second
1      partition:
1 
1           $ mkfs.vfat /dev/sdX2
1 
1    ---------- Footnotes ----------
1 
1    (1) Cheap flash drives will be with us for a long time to come, and,
1 for them, 1MiB alignment is not enough.  Use at least 4MiB-aligned
1 partitions.  For details, see Arnd Bergman's article,
1 <http://http://lwn.net/Articles/428584/> and its many comments.
1