Partition Management for the Debian Installer

Anton Zinoviev

This manual is free software; you may redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2, or (at your option) any later version.

This is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but without any warranty; without even the implied warranty of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. See the GNU General Public License for more details.

A copy of the GNU General Public License is available as /usr/share/common-licenses/GPL in the Debian GNU/Linux distribution or on the World Wide Web at the GNU website. You can also obtain it by writing to the Free Software Foundation, Inc., 51 Franklin St, Fifth Floor, Boston, MA 02110-1301, USA.


Table of Contents

1. Introduction
2. Changes in partman since 2005
3. Package interrelations
3.1. Basics
3.2. Menu-directories
3.3. Partitioning
3.4. Setup /target
4. /lib/partman/lib/*
4.1. Environment
4.2. Menus
4.3. Long numbers
4.4. Updating partition directories
4.5. Communication with parted_server
5. The commands of parted_server
5.1. Open a new device
5.2. Close a device
5.3. Does the partition exist on the disk?
5.4. Remember the partition table as unchanged
5.5. Report whether the partition table is changed
5.6. Dump the partitions
5.7. Write partitioning to the disk
5.8. Undo the changes
5.9. Get the partitions
5.10. Getting info about a partition
5.11. Getting cylinder/head/sector geometry of a partition/free space
5.12. Getting the supported partition table types
5.13. Get the type of the disk label
5.14. Create a new empty partition table
5.15. Getting the meaningful flags for a partition
5.16. Getting the active flags of a partition
5.17. Set the flags of a partition
5.18. Check if partition names are supported
5.19. Set the name of a partition
5.20. Get the maximum number of primary partitions
5.21. Check if extended and logical partitions are supported
5.22. Get the known to parted_server file systems
5.23. Try to detect the file system in a partition
5.24. Change the filesystem of a partition
5.25. Create a new partition
5.26. Delete a partition
5.27. Resize a partition
5.28. Get resize range
6. Bugs and limitations