Arch Linux

apollo22

Member

Registered: 2018-04-13

Posts: 34

Use of gdisk today

Hi there,

Is there any reason to use gdisk today ? Although is see there that gdisk is to be used when manipulating GPT partition tables, we can now do it with fdisk.

PS: The specific phrase about this dates back to March 5, 2013.

Slithery

Administrator

From: Norfolk, UK

Registered: 2013-12-01

Posts: 5,776

Re: Use of gdisk today

Personal preference.

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Head_on_a_Stick

Member

From: The Wirral

Registered: 2014-02-20

Posts: 9,003

Website

Re: Use of gdisk today

I find gdisk's interface more intuitive and it does display more information.

I also find it really annoying that fdisk (and parted) automatically create type 8300 partitions and this has to be changed afterwards — at least gdisk has the good manners to ask which type of partition is needed.

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Trilby

Inspector Parrot

Registered: 2011-11-29

Posts: 30,523

Website

Re: Use of gdisk today

And to prove Slithery's point, I find fdisk's inferface much easier to use as it stays out of the way not displaying needless information.  I like that it has sensible defaults that in many cases I can just accept and move on.  Also, gdisk starts with a g.  It does not start with a g for the same reason many other pieces of software do, but it voluntarily put itself in their company, so it gets the same gut reaction.

But note, your question could just as easily have been phrased "Use of fdisk today", why use fdisk at all of gdisk can do all the same stuff?  The answer is the same, though.

Last edited by Trilby (2018-04-13 11:12:22)

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"UNIX is simple and coherent" - Dennis Ritchie; "GNU's Not Unix" - Richard Stallman

mxfm

Member

Registered: 2015-10-23

Posts: 166

Re: Use of gdisk today

Hi there,

Is there any reason to use gdisk today ? Although is see there that gdisk is to be used when manipulating GPT partition tables, we can now do it with fdisk.

PS: The specific phrase about this dates back to March 5, 2013.

You can answer this question yourself - just do a carefull study of using fdisk and gdisk and provide technical report. If you find that gdisk loses in comparison on technical criteria, you can conclude that there are no technical reasons to use it (in other words, it is only about personal preferences).

Last time I was using both fdisk/gdisk to compare them was in 2016. At that time I could not find how to do some stuff in fdisk and I preferred gdisk interface. I stuck with it since that time.

chungy

Member

Registered: 2009-09-07

Posts: 32

Re: Use of gdisk today

gdisk exposes complete control of the GPT to the user, which may or may not be useful. fdisk is quite a bit more basic (possibly due to its origins as an MBR tool).

nl6720

The Evil Wiki Admin

Registered: 2016-07-02

Posts: 718

Re: Use of gdisk today

For backup gdisk is better since it backups the protective MBR and both GPT headers instead of only the partition layout like fdisk.
Also a nice thing about gdisk is that it displays the partition names (PARTLABELs) when printing the layout, fdisk only lists the partition types. If you have multiple partitions with the same type it can be annoying.
Another annoyance fdisk has is that it doesn't allow to specify the start of partition with +size{K,M,G,T,P}.