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I was just curious about what are those available partition table types in gparted useful for. Is there any reason to use them instead of MBR or GPT ?

  • atari
  • aix
  • amiga
  • bsd
  • dvh
  • mac
  • pc98
  • sun
Nicryc
  • 765

1 Answers1

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What are those available partition table types in gparted useful for?

The options you mention (other than Atari) are covered below (and I guess Atari is there to support Atari partition tables).

The options correspond to the various partitioning systems supported in libparted; there's not much documentation, but looking at the source code:

  • aix provides support for the volumes used in IBM’s AIX (which introduced what we now know as LVM);
  • amiga provides support for the Amiga’s RDB partitioning scheme;
  • bsd provides support for BSD disk labels;
  • dvh provides support for SGI disk volume headers;
  • gpt provides support for GUID partition tables;
  • mac provides support for old (pre-GPT) Apple partition tables;
  • msdos provides support for DOS-style MBR partition tables;
  • pc98 provides support for PC-98 partition tables;
  • sun provides support for Sun’s partitioning scheme;
  • loop provides support for raw disk access (loopback-style) — I’m not sure about the uses for this one.

As you can see, the majority of these are for older systems, and you probably won’t need to create a partition table of any type other than gpt or msdos.

For a new disk, I recommend gpt: it allows more partitions, it can be booted even in pre-UEFI systems (using grub), and supports disks larger than 2 TiB (up to 8 ZiB for 512-byte sector disks). Actually, if you don’t need to boot from the disk, I’d recommend not using a partitioning scheme at all and simply adding the whole disk to mdadm, LVM, or a zpool, depending on whether you use LVM (on top of mdadm or not) or ZFS.

Source What are the differences between the various partition tables?, answer by Stephen Kitt

DavidPostill
  • 162,382