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by Roderick W. Smith, rodsmith@rodsbooks.com
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This software is intended as a (somewhat) fdisk-workalike program for
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GPT-partitioned disks. Although libparted and programs that use it (GNU
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Parted, gparted, etc.) provide the ability to handle GPT disks, they have
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certain limitations that gdisk overcomes. Specific advantages of gdisk
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* The ability to convert MBR-partitioned disks in-place to GPT format,
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* The ability to convert BSD disklabels in-place to create GPT
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partitions, without losing data
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* The ability to specify sector-exact partition sizes
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* More flexible specification of filesystem type code GUIDs, which
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GNU Parted tends to corrupt (particularly for FAT partitions)
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* Clear identification of the number of unallocated sectors on a
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* A user interface that's familiar to long-time users of Linux
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* The MBR boot loader code is left alone (GNU Parted tends to
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wipe it out with every change)
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* The ability to create a hybrid MBR, which permits GPT-unaware
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OSes to access up to three GPT partitions on the disk
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Of course, gdisk isn't without its limitations. Most notably, it lacks the
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filesystem awareness and filesystem-related features of GNU Parted. You
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can't resize a partition's filesystem or create a partition with a
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filesystem already in place with gdisk, for instance. There's no GUI
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To compile gdisk, you must have appropriate development tools installed,
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most notably the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) and its g++ compiler for
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C++. Uncompress the package and type "make" at the command prompt in the
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resulting directory. The result should be a program file called gdisk. You
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can use this in place or copy the file to a suitable directory, such as
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/usr/local/sbin. You can copy the man page (gdisk.8) to /usr/local/man/man8
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THIS SOFTWARE IS EARLY BETA SOFTWARE! IF IT WIPES OUT YOUR HARD DISK OR
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EATS YOUR CAT, DON'T BLAME ME! To date, I've tested the software mainly on
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two USB flash drives, 2 GiB and 8 GiB in size. I've also made a few minor
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tweaks to a production system with a 500 GiB hard disk and made more
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extensive changes to a handful of 80-160 GiB hard disks. I believe all
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data-corruption bugs to be squashed, but I know full well that the odds of
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my missing something are high. This is particularly true for large drives;
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I have no way of testing the software with > 2TiB drives, which will test
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the 64-bit sector pointer support. I've received user reports of success
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with >2TiB drives, though.
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My main development platform is a system running the 64-bit version of
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Ubuntu 8.04. I've also tested on 64-bit OpenSuSE, 32-bit Fedora 10, 32-bit
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Ubuntu 6.10, 64-bit Gentoo, 32-bit PowerPC Linux, 32-bit Intel-based Mac
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OS X, and 64-bit Fedora 7.1. Problems relating to 64-bit integers on the
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32-bit Linux have been common during development and may crop up in the
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future. The Mac OS X, FreeBSD, and big-endian (PowerPC) support are new.
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This program is licensed under terms of the GNU GPL (see the file COPYING).
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This code is mostly my own; however, I've used three functions from two
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- The code used to generate CRCs is taken from the efone program by
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Krzysztof Dabrowski and ElysiuM deeZine. (See the crc32.h and
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crc32.cc source code files.)
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- A function to find the disk size is taken from Linux fdisk by
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Additional code contributors include:
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- Yves Blusseau (1otnwmz02@sneakemail.com)
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- David Hubbard (david.c.hubbard@gmail.com)