> Just out of curiosity, what are the fundamental differences between > fdisk and parted? fdisk was there first, fdisk exists for almost every platform (arch/os) out there, fdisk is more simple, fdisk hardly tries to be smart and acts as a dumb partitioner instead ("do what I say" instead of "do what I mean"). Ah, and fdisk support setting a partition's id to arbitrary values, a thing Parted can't do ATM. It is on my TODO list, though. Come to think of it, this could be some very interesting piece of work fo= r you. > fdisk definitely seems to be much more popular, > especially with distro installers. Is it? > Why? Only because it came first, or has it really got something we don't? To quote our fellow developer Harley, "fdisk will read half a disk label" ;) Parted won't (throws an assertion on most invalid things). Note that Harley has almost finished an fdisk clone built on libparted and will do so for cfdisk, too. If you're interested you can check out his code from /upstream/people/hde/trunk+fdisk. He is currently working on making it a separate package, though. The program will most likely become part of the GNU project. [ed.: the fdisk clone has become a part of the GNU project.]