Name¶
mpartition - partition an MSDOS hard disk
Note of warning¶
This manpage has been automatically generated from mtools's texinfo
documentation, and may not be entirely accurate or complete. See the end of
this man page for details.
Description¶
The mpartition command is used to create MS-DOS file systems as partitions. This
is intended to be used on non-Linux systems, i.e. systems where fdisk and easy
access to SCSI devices are not available. This command only works on drives
whose partition variable is set.
mpartition -p drive
mpartition -r drive
mpartition -I [-B bootSector] drive
mpartition -a drive
mpartition -d drive
mpartition -c [-s sectors] [-h heads]
[-t cylinders] [-v [-T type] [-b
begin] [-l length] [-f]
Mpartition supports the following operations:
- p
- Prints a command line to recreate the partition for the drive. Nothing is
printed if the partition for the drive is not defined, or an inconsistency
has been detected. If verbose (-v) is also set, prints the current
partition table.
- r
- Removes the partition described by drive.
- I
- Initializes the partition table, and removes all partitions.
- c
- Creates the partition described by drive.
- a
- "Activates" the partition, i.e. makes it bootable. Only one
partition can be bootable at a time.
- d
- "Deactivates" the partition, i.e. makes it unbootable.
If no operation is given, the current settings are printed.
For partition creations, the following options are available:
- s sectors
- The number of sectors per track of the partition (which is also the number
of sectors per track for the whole drive).
- h heads
- The number of heads of the partition (which is also the number of heads
for the whole drive). By default, the geometry information (number of
sectors and heads) is figured out from neighboring partition table
entries, or guessed from the size.
- t cylinders
- The number of cylinders of the partition (not the number of cylinders of
the whole drive.
- b begin
- The starting offset of the partition, expressed in sectors. If begin is
not given, mpartition lets the partition begin at the start of the disk
(partition number 1), or immediately after the end of the previous
partition.
- l length
- The size (length) of the partition, expressed in sectors. If end is not
given, mpartition figures out the size from the number of sectors, heads
and cylinders. If these are not given either, it gives the partition the
biggest possible size, considering disk size and start of the next
partition.
The following option is available for all operation which modify the partition
table:
- f
- Usually, before writing back any changes to the partition, mpartition
performs certain consistency checks, such as checking for overlaps and
proper alignment of the partitions. If any of these checks fails, the
partition table is not changes. The -f allows you to override these
safeguards.
The following options are available for all operations:
- v
- Together with -p prints the partition table as it is now (no change
operation), or as it is after it is modified.
- vv
- If the verbosity flag is given twice, mpartition will print out a hexdump
of the partition table when reading it from and writing it to the
device.
The following option is available for partition table initialization:
- B bootSector
- Reads the template master boot record from file bootSector.
See Also¶
Mtools' texinfo doc
Viewing the texi doc¶
This manpage has been automatically generated from mtools's texinfo
documentation. However, this process is only approximative, and some items,
such as crossreferences, footnotes and indices are lost in this translation
process. Indeed, these items have no appropriate representation in the manpage
format. Moreover, not all information has been translated into the manpage
version. Thus I strongly advise you to use the original texinfo doc. See the
end of this manpage for instructions how to view the texinfo doc.
- *
- To generate a printable copy from the texinfo doc, run the following
commands:
./configure; make dvi; dvips mtools.dvi
- *
- To generate a html copy, run:
./configure; make html
A premade html can be found at
`
http://www.gnu.org/software/mtools/manual/mtools.html'
- *
- To generate an info copy (browsable using emacs' info mode), run:
./configure; make info
The texinfo doc looks most pretty when printed or as html. Indeed, in the info
version certain examples are difficult to read due to the quoting conventions
used in info.