Week 23: Day 059 - Managing Partitions

Hello, today I'm going to talk about managing MBR and GPT partitions, and touch on mounting file systems. MBR stands for " Master Boot Record", and GPT stands for "GUID Partition Table". This one might be a little long, so let's get right into it.

Basically, MBR is ancient and it was made in the 80s, so soon it will be deprecated. At first it was defined with a size of 512 bytes on the hard drive. Let's talk about GPT now. This is exponentially better, this is why. The upsides to using GPT not only include having up to 120 partitions, but also having up to 8 zetabytes of space available on each one, the 2 TiB limit no longer exists, and because space that is available to store partitions is much bigger than 64 bytes, which was used in MBR, there is no longer a need to distinguish between primary, extended, and logical partitions. GPT uses a 128-bit global unique ID (GUID) to identify partitions, and backup copy of the GUID partition table is created by default at the end of the disk.

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Get ready for some exercises. Here I will be responding to the exercise underneath the steps, as usual. Basically, this will cover the creation of MBR and GPT partitions. A few quick notes however, fdisk is the command associated with MBR, while gdisk is associated with GPT.

This exercise has been written to use an installation of RHEL/CentOS that contains nonpartitioned disk space. If you do not have such an installation, you can use a second disk device on your demo environment. This can be a virtual disk that is added through your virtualization program, or a USB flash drive if working on a physical installation. In that case, make sure the device names in this exercise are replaced with the device names that match your hardware.

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Quick Note: Swap is RAM (fake according to Marco) which is derived from the hard drive.

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I won't even get into mounting at this point, I've learned a lot about it ever since that var issue that Marco and I had. Thanks for reading, and goodbye.