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2. Volumes

2.1 PC Partitions

GNU parted

GNU parted can create, destroy, resize, copy and move partitions, and the filesystems on them. It currently supports Ext2, FAT16, FAT32 and Linux-swap. 

Filesystem      detect  create  resize  copy    check
ext2            *               *               *1
fat             *       *       *2      *2      *
linux-swap      *       *       *       *

NOTES:

1 Limited checking is done when the filesystem is opened. This is the only checking at the moment. All commands (including resize) will gracefully fail, leaving the filesystem in tact, if there is are any errors in the file system (and the vast majority of errors in general).

2 The size of the new partition, after resizing or copying, is restricted by the cluster size. This is worse than you think, because you don't get to choose your cluster size (it's a bug in Windows, and you want compatibility, right?).

Repairing corrupted partition table

Fixdisktable

This is a utility that handles ext2, FAT, NTFS, ufs, BSD disklabels (but not yet old Linux swap partitions); it actually will rewrite the partition table, if you give it permission.

gpart

GPART is a utility that handles ext2, FAT, Linux swap, HPFS, NTFS, FreeBSD and Solaris/x86 disklabels, minix, reiser fs; it prints a proposed contents for the primary partition table, and is well-documented.

rescuept

Recognizes ext2 superblocks, FAT partitions, swap partitions, and extended partition tables; it may also recognize BSD disklabels and Unixware 7 partitions. It prints out information that can be used with fdisk or sfdisk to reconstruct the partition table. It is in the non-installed part of the util-linux distribution.

findsuper

Small utility that finds blocks with the ext2 superblock signature, and prints out location and some info. It is in the non-installed part of the e2progs distribution.

2.2 Other partitions

Because I use only Intel x86 machines, any contributions (or non-x86 machine donation ;-) ) are very welcome. If you can provide any useful information, don't hesitate to mail me.

ADFS partitions

Amiga partitions

ATARI partitions

Macintosh partitions

OSF partitions

Sun partitions

Ultrix partitions

2.3 Unix disklabels

(todo)

BSD disklabel

(todo)

UnixWare disklabel

UnixWare VTOC (Volume Table Of Contents) divides disk partition to 16 logical partitions. Linux kernel supports UnixWare VTOC, you must check "UnixWare slices support (EXPERIMENTAL)" and recompile your kernel. Another way of reading UnixWare disklabel is using GPL port of prtvtoc(1) command, which is in vxtools package.

SCO OpenServer disklabel

(todo)

Sun Solaris disklabel

(todo)

2.4 Windows NT volumes

This linux-kernel driver allows you to access and mount linear and stripe set volumes.

Repairing "fault tolerant" NTFS disks using FTEdit

If you have a Windows NT Workstation or Server configured for fault tolerant (FT) partitions (such as stripes with parity and volume sets), and those partitions are inaccessible and appear in Disk Administrator as type Unknown, you can possibly make them accessible again by using the utility FTEDIT.

2.5 MD - Multiple Devices driver for Linux

This driver lets you combine several hard disk partitions into one logical block device. This can be used to simply append one partition to another one or to combine several redundant hard disks to a RAID1/4/5 device so as to provide protection against hard disk failures. This is called "Software RAID" since the combining of the partitions is done by the kernel.

2.6 LVM - Logical Volume Manager (HP-UX LVM?)

Linux implementation is available here:

2.7 VxVM - Veritas Volume Manager

For more information about Veritas Volume Manager see http://www.veritas.com/.

See also: VxFS (Veritas Journaling Filesystem).

2.8 IBM OS/2 LVM

Logical Volume Manager is available in OS/2 WarpServer 5. It allows you to create linear volumes on several disks/partitions. Some people say that it's compatible with IBM AIX Logical Volume Manager.

See also: HPFS, JFS

2.9 StackVM

StackVM is CrosStor's volume manager. Using StackVM the administrator can combine multiple physical disk slices into a single logical device know as a vdisk. Vdisk is short for virtual disk. The physical disks can be combined to form a concatenation, RAID 0 (stripe), RAID 1 (mirror), RAID 4 or RAID 5. In addition a single disk partition can be subdivided into multiple simple vdisks. For more information see CrosStor homepage at http://www.crosstor.com/.

2.10 Novell NetWare volumes

NetWare volumes are used for NWFS-386 filesystem.

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