13.2. Creating a Partition

Procedure 13.1. Creating a Partition

1. Before creating a partition, boot into rescue mode, or unmount any partitions on the device and turn off any swap space on the device.
2. Start parted:

   # parted /dev/sda# parted /dev/sda

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   Replace /dev/sda with the device name on which you want to create the partition.
3. View the current partition table to determine if there is enough free space:

   (parted) print

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   If there is not enough free space, you can resize an existing partition. For more information, see Section 13.5, “Resizing a Partition with fdisk”.
   From the partition table, determine the start and end points of the new partition and what partition type it should be. You can only have four primary partitions, with no extended partition, on a device. If you need more than four partitions, you can have three primary partitions, one extended partition, and multiple logical partitions within the extended. For an overview of disk partitions, see the appendix An Introduction to Disk Partitions in the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 Installation Guide.
4. To create partition:

   (parted) mkpart part-type name fs-type start endmkpart part-type name fs-type start end

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   Replace part-type with with primary, logical, or extended as per your requirement.
   Replace name with partition-name; name is required for GPT partition tables.
   Replace fs-type with any one of btrfs, ext2, ext3, ext4, fat16, fat32, hfs, hfs+, linux-swap, ntfs, reiserfs, or xfs; fs-type is optional.
   Replace start end with the size in megabytes as per your requirement.
   For example, to create a primary partition with an ext3 file system from 1024 megabytes until 2048 megabytes on a hard drive, type the following command:

   (parted) mkpart primary 1024 2048

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   Note

   If you use the mkpartfs command instead, the file system is created after the partition is created. However, parted does not support creating an ext3 file system. Thus, if you wish to create an ext3 file system, use mkpart and create the file system with the mkfs command as described later.
   The changes start taking place as soon as you press Enter, so review the command before executing to it.
5. View the partition table to confirm that the created partition is in the partition table with the correct partition type, file system type, and size using the following command:

   (parted) print

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   Also remember the minor number of the new partition so that you can label any file systems on it.
6. Exit the parted shell:

   (parted) quit

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7. Use the following command after parted is closed to make sure the kernel recognizes the new partition:

   # cat /proc/partitions 

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