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Disk partitioning

parted

Arch wiki: parted Parted Manual Beware of Rounding:

when creating a partition, you should prefer to specify units of bytes (“B”), sectors (“s”), or IEC binary units like “MiB”, but not “MB”, “GB”, etc.

Script mode:

sudo parted --script /dev/sdX COMMAND

Or interactively:

sudo parted /dev/sdX

Use GPT as partition table:

mklabel gpt

Or for sdcards/compability with legacy devices:

mklabel msdos

Create partition (GPT):

mkpart "data partition" ext4 0% 100%
mkpart "ventoy" ext4 0% 64GiB
mkpart "data" ext4 64GiB 100%
quit

Then format the disk:

sudo mkfs.ext4 -m0 -L usbstick /dev/sdX1

or for vfat:

sudo mkfs.vfat -n fotos /dev/mmcblk0p1

Moving partitions

Move swap partition to the right:

sudo swapoff -a
cat /proc/swaps
sudo cryptsetup close luks-6e172db0-9606-4aa8-afd8-c108cc190eea

Now move the partition with gparted. Afterwards:

sudo cryptsetup  open --type luks /dev/nvme0n1p3 luks-6e172db0-9606-4aa8-afd8-c108cc190eea
sudo mkswap /dev/mapper/luks-6e172db0-9606-4aa8-afd8-c108cc190eea  # only when resized
sudo swapon -a
cat /proc/swaps

Examples

Create a new single patition on i.e. a usb drive and format it with FAT32:

sudo parted -s /dev/sdX -- mklabel msdos mkpart primary fat32 2048s -1s
sudo mkfs.vfat -F 32 /dev/sdX1

gdisk

sgdisk

Install:

sudo pacman -S gptfdisk

Print partition table:

sudo sgdisk -p /dev/sdX

Backup MBR / GPT

sudo parted -l | grep "Partition Table"
  • Partition Table: gpt -> GPT
  • Partition Table: msdos -> MBR

MBR

Backup:

sfdisk -d /dev/sdX > /home/varac/backup/mbr.sdX.img

Restore:

sfdisk /dev/sda < /home/varac/backup/mbr.sdX.img

GPT

Backup:

sgdisk --backup=/home/varac/backup/gpt.sdX.img /dev/sdX

Restore:

sgdisk --load-backup=/home/varac/backup/gpt.sdX.img /dev/sdX