In Linux, there are a few different partitioning command line tools we can use. One that supports both mbr and gpt partitioning is the parted tool. Parted can be used in two modes, the first is interactive, meaning were launched into a separate program like when we use the less command. The second is command line, meaning you just run commands while still in your shell. We're going to be using the interactive mode for most of this lesson. Before we do that, let's run a command to show what disks are connected to the computer using the command line mode. We can do this by running the parted-l command. So sudo parted-l. This list out the disks that are connected to our computer. We can see that the disk/dev/sda is 128GB. I've also plugged in a USB drive, and you can see that /dev/sdb is around eight gigabytes. Let's quickly go through what this output says. Here we can see the partition table is listed as gpt. The number field corresponds to the number of partitions on the disk. We can see that there are three partitions, since this disk is /dev/sda, the first partition will correspond to /dev/sda1 and the second will correspond to /dev/sda2 etc. The start field is where the partition starts on the disk. For this first partition, we can see that it starts at 1049 kB and ends at 538MB, the field after that shows us how large the partition sizes. The next field, tells us what file system is on the partition. Then, we have the name and finally we can see some flags that are associated with this partition. You can see here that /dev/sdb doesn't currently have any partitions. We'll fix that in a minute. Let's select our /dev/sdb disk and start partitioning it. We want to be super careful that we select the correct disk when partitioning something, so we don't accidentally partition the wrong disk. We're going to use the interactive mode of parted by running sudo parted /dev/sdb. Now we're in the parted tool. From here we can run more commands, if we want to get out of this tool and go back to the shell, then we just use the quick command. I'm going to run print, just to see this disk one more time. It says we have an unrecognized disc label. We'll need to set a disc label with the make label command, since we want to use the gpt partition table, let's use this command, mklabel gpt. Let's look at the status of our disk again to do that, we can use a print command. Here, we can see the disk information for the selected /dev/sdb disk. Now it says we have the partition table, gpt. All right, let's start making modifications to the disk. We want to partition the /dev/sdb disk into two partitions. Inside the parted tool we're going to use the mkpart command. The mkpart command needs to have the following information, what type of partition we want to make, what file system we want to format, and the start of the disk, and the end of the disk. Like this, The partition type is only meaningful for mbr partition tables. Remember the mbr uses primary, extended, and logical partitions. Since we're formatting this using gpt, we're just going to use primary as the partition type. The start point here is one mebibyte and the endpoint is five gibibytes, so our petition is essentially five gibibytes. Remember from an earlier course, that data sizes have long been referred to in two different ways, using the exact data measurement, and the estimated data measurement. Remember that one kibibyte is actually 1024 bytes, while one kilobyte is 1000 bytes. We haven't really had to care about this distinction before. Some operating systems sometimes measure one kilobyte as 1024 bytes, which is confusing, but when dealing with data storage, we want to make sure we're using the precise measurements, so we don't waste precious storage space. Let's opt to use mebibyte and gibibyte in our partition. Next we're going to format the partition with a file system using mkfs. So I'm just going to quit, sudo mkfs- t ext4 and I want to format the partition. So sdb1, We also left the rest of the disc unpartitioned, because we're going to use it for something else later. With that we've created a partition and formatted a file system on a USB drive. Remember to always be careful when using the parted tool. It's very powerful and if you modify the wrong disk on here, it could cause a pretty big mess. Even though we've partition our disk and formatted a file system on here, we're not actually able to start reading and writing files to it just yet. There's one last step to get a usable disk in Linux. We have to mount the file system to a directory so that we can access it from the shell.
