fdisk for efi disks?

Hi,

I'm a new kid on the block and I was interested if anyone was already working on an fdisk replacement/enhancement to be used on efi disks?

I wonder if enhancing fdisk such that it also handles efi disks would be better than building a new tool (efdisk)?

Josef Möllers (Pinguinpfleger bei FSC)
	If failure had no penalty success would not be a prize (T.  Pratchett)

I started work to add GPT support to GNU parted, but made it for 1.2.x, not the current 1.4.x, and haven't had the time to do the forward-port. If you've got the time, I'm happy to send you my original patch.

Modifying fdisk would be useful too, IMHO.

Thanks,
Matt Domsch
Dell Enterprise Systems Group
Linux Development Team

Josef> Hi, I'm a new kid on the block and I was interested if anyone Josef> was already working on an fdisk replacement/enhancement to be Josef> used on efi disks?

Josef> I wonder if enhancing fdisk such that it also handles efi Josef> disks would be better than building a new tool (efdisk)?

I'm interested in this, too. Please keep us posted in what you find. (IMHO, fdisk is the program from hell, but it still may be better to extend fdisk than writing a new tool just because it's so well-known.)

	--david

within the next week or two we expect to be able to release three EFI utilities that help to manage GPT partitions:

- diskpart.efi (semantic equivalent to FDISK, but for GPT)
- efifmt.efi (semantic equivalent to FORMAT, for EFI FAT)
- efichk.efi (semantic equivalent to SCANDISK, for EFI FAT)

These will come in binary and source form. For use as EFI utilities (say from the EFI shell prompt or started from the boot manager), we would recommend using the binaries as-is for maximum compatibility of course. The source will be provided so that if you want to make versions that run in OS-present environments, you can do that as well.

The utilities have been through beta test and are just now coming back to me again for packaging prior to release so it shouldn't be long now. These will be available for download from the EFI web pages on Intel's Developer site ( http://developer.intel.com/technology/efi ) with a click-wrap license similar to the one in use for the sample code and the toolkit that are already on the site.

While I can't say for sure one way or the other, I have heard no plans from Microsoft to make versions of their DOS disk management tools that support GPT. You would need to approach Microsoft directly for the definitive answer on that though.

Thanks to Sunil Saxena for passing this along (I'm not on the mailias for this group so if you want me to see replies, please make sure to copy me explicitly).

Hope that helps!

Cheers,

Mark.
--
Mark Doran
EFI Program Manager
Intel Corp.