LinuxQuestions.org - fdisk vs parted

Hi,

You could 'man command' to understand;

Quote:

excerpt 'man parted';

GNU Parted - a partition manipulation program
SYNOPSIS
parted [options] [device [command [options...]...]]
DESCRIPTION
This manual page documents briefly the parted command. Complete documentation is distributed with the package in GNU Info format; see below.

parted is a disk partitioning and partition resizing program. It allows you to create, destroy, resize, move and copy ext2, ext3, linux-swap, FAT and FAT32 partitions. This is useful for creating space for new operating systems, reorganising disk usage, and copying data to new hard disks.

Quote:

excerpt 'man fdisk';
fdisk - Partition table manipulator for Linux
SYNOPSIS
fdisk [-u] [-b sectorsize] [-C cyls] [-H heads] [-S sects] device

fdisk -l [-u] [device ...]

fdisk -s partition ...

fdisk -v
DESCRIPTION
Hard disks can be divided into one or more logical disks called partitions. This division is described in the partition table found in sector 0 of the disk.

In the BSD world one talks about `disk slices' and a `disklabel'.

Linux needs at least one partition, namely for its root file system. It can use swap files and/or swap partitions, but the latter are more efficient. So, usually one will want a second Linux partition dedicated as swap partition. On Intel compatible hardware, the BIOS that boots the system can often only access the first 1024 cylinders of the disk. For this reason people with large disks often create a third partition, just a few MB large, typically mounted on /boot, to store the kernel image and a few auxiliary files needed at boot time, so as to make sure that this stuff is accessible to the BIOS. There may be reasons of security, ease of administration and backup, or testing, to use more than the minimum number of partitions.

fdisk (in the first form of invocation) is a menu driven program for creation and manipulation of partition tables. It understands DOS type partition tables and BSD or SUN type disklabels.

Now, if you have read the above underlined for understanding then what don't you understand? If this is homework you will have to note your references. :)