A 4 TB disk /dev/sdb carries an MBR partition table with data you must keep, and you need it converted to GPT in place so that the whole disk becomes usable. Which interactive tool is built to do that conversion?
LPIC-1 Exam 101-500, objective 104. Devices, Linux filesystems, filesystem hierarchy standard hard
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The options
Correct gdisk /dev/sdb
Correct. gdisk reads an existing MBR, presents it as a GPT layout in memory, and writes a real GPT on `w`, preserving the partition boundaries it found.
Not correct fdisk /dev/sdb
Wrong for the conversion. Modern util-linux fdisk understands GPT and can create a new GPT label, but creating a label starts an empty table rather than translating the partitions already there.
Not correct parted /dev/sdb mklabel gpt
Wrong, and destructive. mklabel writes a fresh, empty disk label, so every existing partition entry is thrown away.
Not correct partprobe /dev/sdb
Wrong. partprobe only asks the running kernel to re-read the partition table that is already on the disk; it never changes what is written there.
Why
gdisk is the GPT counterpart of fdisk from the gptfdisk package, and its defining feature is that it loads an MBR or a BSD disklabel and converts it to GPT when you write. fdisk and parted can both produce a GPT disk, but only by laying down a new, empty label, which loses the existing entries. As with any partition-table work, nothing touches the disk until the write command is given, and the data in the partitions is untouched by a table conversion only if the boundaries are carried over unchanged.
Where this comes from
- Cited
- manual page gdisk(8)
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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