sfdisk problems partitioning whole drive

jcai · 06-22-2006, 04:44 PM

im running on RHEL 4 ES

when i try to use SFDISK to partition my new harddrive in the following way i get the following error:

sfdisk /dev/sda << EOF
>;
>EOF

Checking that no-one is using this disk right now ...
OK

Disk /dev/sda: 218428 cylinders, 255 heads, 63 sectors/track
Old situation:
Units = cylinders of 8225280 bytes, blocks of 1024 bytes, counting from 0

Device Boot Start End #cyls #blocks Id System
/dev/sda1 0 - 0 0 0 Empty
/dev/sda2 0 - 0 0 0 Empty
/dev/sda3 0 - 0 0 0 Empty
/dev/sda4 0 - 0 0 0 Empty
no room for partition descriptor

sfdisk: bad input

does anyone know whats going on?

pljvaldez · 06-22-2006, 05:23 PM

No idea, but I generally do all my partitioning from the GParted live CD. That way I'm sure no one is using any of the shared drives...

jcai · 06-22-2006, 05:33 PM

thing is, i need sfdisk so i can run it from a script

pljvaldez · 06-22-2006, 05:36 PM

From the man page, it appears that sfdisk doesn't understand GUID partition tables and also doesn't like large partitions. Never used sfdisk myself, sorry I can't be of more help!

homey · 06-22-2006, 06:52 PM

First, I made a backup of my /dev/sda partition table with the command: sfdisk -d /dev/sda > sda.out

That way, I can restore it to previous settings with the command:
sfdisk /dev/sda < sda.out

Then, I ran your command:

Code:

sfdisk /dev/sda << EOF
;
EOF

It works with this output...

Code:

   Device Boot Start     End   #cyls    #blocks   Id  System
/dev/sda1          0+  12187   12188-  97900109+  83  Linux
/dev/sda2          0       -       0          0    0  Empty
/dev/sda3          0       -       0          0    0  Empty
/dev/sda4          0       -       0          0    0  Empty

So anyway, that command does work on my FC5 box, don't know why it's not working for you.

sfdisk -v
sfdisk (util-linux 2.13-pre7