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.