Parted Commands to Manage Disk Partition

Parted is a free GNU utility used to manage hard disk partitions from the command line. It can create, delete, resize, and print disk partition, and more on Linux.

More often we use parted tool for disk partitioning for running multiple OS, allocating specific system space, or separating valuable files or extending volumes.

Traditionally many users use fdisk tool for partitioning, the primary reason to use parted when disk size bigger than 2TB. Initially parted only supported GPT, and from util-linux 2.23 fdisk also started supporting GPT.

In this tutorial, I will show how to use parted command for disk management in Linux

Install Parted on Linux

Parted is by default installed on most modern Linux distributions. If it's not included in your distribution, install parted manually.

Installing parted on Ubuntu and Debian flavored distros:

$ sudo apt-get install parted

Installing parted on CentOS and RHEL:

$ sudo yum install parted

When you run parted command without any options it will print parted package version, choose the first drive by default and wait at the prompt for extra commands. Parted command has to be run as root or a user with Sudo access.

$ sudo parted
GNU Parted 3.2
Using /dev/xvda
Welcome to GNU Parted! Type 'help' to view a list of commands.
(parted)

Type quit to exit from the parted prompt.

Important: All changes are made to the disk as soon typed your command.

List Disk Partitions

Let's check how to print all disk information and its partitions. By default parted choose first drive. To print all disk partitions type print all.

Note: The warning showing in output is because that disk has unallocated disk space yet to be provisioned.

ubuntu@linoxide:~$ sudo parted
GNU Parted 3.2
Using /dev/xvda
Welcome to GNU Parted! Type 'help' to view a list of commands.
                                                                       (parted) print all
Model: Xen Virtual Block Device (xvd)
Disk /dev/xvda: 8590MB
Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/512B
Partition Table: msdos
Disk Flags:

Number  Start   End     Size    Type     File system  Flags
 1      1049kB  8590MB  8589MB  primary  ext4         boot

Warning: Not all of the space available to /dev/xvdb appears to be
used, you can fix the GPT to use all of the space (an extra 25165824
blocks) or continue with the current setting?
                                                                                                                                              Fix/Ignore? Ignore
Model: Xen Virtual Block Device (xvd)
Disk /dev/xvdb: 21.5GB
Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/512B
Partition Table: gpt
Disk Flags:

Number  Start   End     Size    File system  Name     Flags
 1      17.4kB  1024MB  1024MB  ext4         primary
 2      1024MB  2048MB  1023MB  ext4         primary
(parted)

Instead, you can also use a single command:

$ sudo parted /dev/xvda print all

If you have multiple disks, you can select between the disk using the select command:

Find unallocated space on the disk

To find the unallocated space, choose your disk then run print free command.

Later we will discuss how to use resizepart command to extend partition when you have more unallocated disk space.

Create new disk partition using parted

Normally an operating system is installed on the first disk /dev/sda. When you add a new disk OS will pick the next number as /dev/sdb. To illustrate I am using a Xen virtual disk which uses the naming convention as /dev/xvd.

I have added a new 20GB disk and you can see it as unrecognised disk label.

The first step would be to set your required disk label, supported disk label are bsd, loop, gpt, mac, msdos, pc98, and sun.

(parted) mklabel msdos

Now I am going to segment /dev/xvdb into two primary partitions with the first partition with 10GB and second partition with 5GB.

To create a new partition we use mkpart command with start 0 and end 10000:

To create the second partition, run mkpart command again specifying the start and end size

Note: The concept of 'primary' reflects from MBR, GPT doesn't care but still have to add a name.

You can also use mkpart to create the partition to span the entire drive by specifying the percentage to use (here 0% to 100%).

For example:

$ sudo parted -a opt /dev/sda mkpart primary ext4 0% 100%

Instead of using print command, you can run alternative commands such as lsblk, fdisk -l to see partitions created.

$ lsblk
NAME    MAJ:MIN RM  SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINT
loop0     7:0    0   18M  1 loop /snap/amazon-ssm-agent/1566
loop1     7:1    0 93.8M  1 loop /snap/core/8935
loop2     7:2    0 93.9M  1 loop /snap/core/9066
xvda    202:0    0    8G  0 disk
└─xvda1 202:1    0    8G  0 part /
xvdb    202:16   0   20G  0 disk
├─xvdb1 202:17   0  9.3G  0 part
└─xvdb2 202:18   0  4.7G  0 part
$

Now we can format the partition (/dev/xvdb1) with ex4 filesystem, use mkfs.ext4 as follows:

$ sudo mkfs.ext4 /dev/xvdb1

Resize disk partition using resizepart

To grow the partition, it has to be resized first. Resize simple means moving the end position of a partition.

Here I am going to resize the second partition of /dev/xvdb, moving end position to 20000:

(parted) resizepart

Note: growpart is another handy tool available on Linux to extend a partition.

To resize each file system to the new capacity, you have to run file system-specific command. To extend filesystem in Linux use resize2fs command as follows:

$ sudo resize2fs /dev/xvdb2
resize2fs 1.44.1 (24-Mar-2018)
Resizing the filesystem on /dev/xvdb2 to 2441340 (4k) blocks.
The filesystem on /dev/xvdb2 is now 2441340 (4k) blocks long.

Delete partition from a chosen disk

To delete a partition you should know the partition number on the disk. Use print command in parted to show all partition and its corresponding number.

To delete you can use rm command followed by partition number. Here we going to delete 2nd partition as shown below:

(parted) rm 2

Set flags on partitions

Parted allows to set flags on partition. Don't be surprised some flags depend on disk labels. A flag can be either on or off. Most commons flags are boot, lab, swap, raid, LVM, etc.

The following command set LVM flag on partition 2:

(parted) set 2 LVM on

Another practical example when we need to set a boot partition:

(parted) set 2 boot on

Rescue Linux Disk Partition

Rescue comes to help when you accidentally delete a partition. A lost partition can be recovered by locating between start and end.

Let's delete partition 1 on /dev/xvdb and use rescue command to recover it:

(parted) rescue

Set default unit

Unit command in parted helps to set a default unit to display capacities and locations.
unit supported are:

KiB- kibibyte 
MiB - mebibyte
GiB - gibibyte
TiB - tebibyte
kB - kilobyte
MB - megabyte
GB - gigabyte
TB - terabyte
% - percentage of the device
cyl - cylinders
chs - cylinders, heads, sectors addressing
compact - Use human-readable representation for output

The following command set unit to compact:

(parted) unit compact
(parted) print
Model: Xen Virtual Block Device (xvd)
Disk /dev/xvda: 8590MB
Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/512B
Partition Table: msdos
Disk Flags:

Number  Start   End     Size    Type     File system  Flags
 1      1049kB  8590MB  8589MB  primary  ext4         boot
(parted)

You can also print in units as follows:

(parted) unit GB print
Model: Xen Virtual Block Device (xvd)
Disk /dev/xvda: 8.59GB
Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/512B
Partition Table: msdos
Disk Flags:

Number  Start   End     Size    Type     File system  Flags
 1      0.00GB  8.59GB  8.59GB  primary  ext4         boot

(parted)

Conclusion

At the time of updating this tutorial, we are using parted 3.1 version, and good to verify the currently supported commands using -h option. Parted writes directly to the disk, so be cautious when running any commands.

When making any changes, make sure you choose the correct drive otherwise, it may end up in data loss.

If you have any questions or thoughts to share on this topic, please use the below comment section.