A new disk /dev/sdb has no partition table at all. Which command writes an empty GPT partition table onto it without dropping you into an interactive editor?
LPIC-1 Exam 101-500, objective 104. Devices, Linux filesystems, filesystem hierarchy standard medium
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The options
Not correct fdisk -l /dev/sdb
Wrong. -l only lists the partition table and geometry of a device and exits. It never modifies the disk.
Correct parted -s /dev/sdb mklabel gpt
Correct. parted takes a command on the command line, and mklabel (alias mktable) writes a fresh, empty disk label of the requested type. -s suppresses the confirmation prompt, so it runs unattended.
Not correct partprobe /dev/sdb
Wrong. partprobe asks the running kernel to re-read a partition table that already exists on disk, so that new partitions appear as device nodes. It creates nothing.
Not correct mkfs.ext4 /dev/sdb
Wrong. This puts an ext4 filesystem directly onto the whole raw device, bypassing partitioning entirely. It is legal, but the disk then has no partition table at all.
Why
parted can be driven non-interactively: `parted [-s] DEVICE COMMAND`. `mklabel gpt` creates a new, empty GPT disk label, destroying any previous table. gdisk is the interactive GPT equivalent of fdisk, and fdisk from modern util-linux also understands GPT, but both are interactive editors — their scriptable siblings are sfdisk and sgdisk, which take a partition layout on stdin or on the command line rather than a single mklabel verb.
Where this comes from
- Cited
- LPI exam objective 104.1
- What it says
- Manage MBR and GPT partition tables with fdisk, gdisk and parted.
Practise this
Reading one question is not practice. The trainer will draw a short set from objective 104 and space the ones you get wrong.
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