antlists wrote: > On 25/12/2020 18:24, Neil Bothwick wrote: >> On Fri, 25 Dec 2020 11:41:03 -0500, Walter Dnes wrote: >> >>> After 20 years on linux, I've been reduced to a newbie. BIOS boot, >>> Lilo, and fdisk served me well for 2 decades. Now I'm going to have to >>> learn UEFI, grub, and parted all at once. I'll start a new thread >>> tomorrow once I have my config files copied off. Then I'll install >>> UEFI >>> mode properly. >> >> UEFI is dead simple, and you can use gdisk, which is the GPT variant of >> fdisk. So that only leave the boot manager to learn, and if you don't >> already know GRUB, I'd say start with something simpler. >> >> > I got the impression that on newer systems, gdisk and fdisk were the > same thing ... > > Certainly I moved to gdisk because "fdisk can't handle GPTs", and then > someone said "oh yes it can" so I investigated and oh yes it could. I > still use gdisk, but as I say they now appear to be the same thing. > > Cheers, > Wol > >
I think fdisk couldn't handle GPT at first. I guess that's why gdisk came along. Then I think the fdisk folks added support for GPT and since then it handles both. That's my understanding of it. If possible, you may want to check the time stamps on the info you have found. I suspect the ones saying fdisk can't handle GPT are older posts or people who don't know it can now. From the man page: fdisk is a dialog-driven program for creation and manipulation of partition tables. It understands GPT, MBR, Sun, SGI and BSD partition tables. For gdisk: GPT fdisk (aka gdisk) is a text-mode menu-driven program for creation and manipulation of partition tables. It will automatically convert an old-style Master Boot Record (MBR) partition table or BSD disklabel stored without an MBR carrier partition to the newer Globally Unique Identifier (GUID) Partition Table (GPT) format, or will load a GUID partition table. Odds are, you can likely use either tool but if you are using GPT, you may as well use the tool made for that purpose. I think a lot of it is very similar as far as options that do the same things in each program. Also, there is also cfdisk and cgdisk too. The interface is different. You may want to try the proper one and see which you like. I use c*disk tools myself. You may prefer the others. Same result I guess. Hope that helps. Dale :-) :-)
