Which THREE of the following tools create or modify a partition table on a disk? (Choose three.)
LPIC-1 Exam 101-500, objective 104. Devices, Linux filesystems, filesystem hierarchy standard medium
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The options
Choose 3.
Correct fdisk
Correct. fdisk is the classic interactive partition editor from util-linux and, in current versions, writes MBR, GPT, SGI and SUN labels.
Correct gdisk
Correct. gdisk is the interactive GPT partition editor from the gptfdisk package.
Correct parted
Correct. parted edits partition tables both interactively and from the command line, with verbs such as mklabel, mkpart and rm.
Not correct mkfs
Wrong. mkfs builds a filesystem inside a partition or on a whole device; it never touches the partition table around it.
Not correct mkswap
Wrong. mkswap writes a swap signature into an existing partition or file; the partition's type code is set with a partitioning tool, not by mkswap.
Not correct partprobe
Wrong. partprobe asks the kernel to re-read a partition table that already exists on disk so the device nodes match it; it makes no change to the disk.
Why
Preparing a disk has two distinct stages, and LPIC-1 tests the boundary between them. Partitioning tools (fdisk, gdisk, parted, and the scriptable sfdisk and sgdisk) write the table that divides the disk; filesystem tools (the mkfs family, mkswap) write structures inside one of the resulting partitions. partprobe belongs to neither stage: it only synchronises the running kernel's view with what is already on disk, which is what you run when a newly created partition has no device node yet.
Where this comes from
- Cited
- manual page parted(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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