General
- Actively maintained
- Support for CHS and LBA addressing modes
- Support for logical sector sizes not equal to 512
- Support for device's alignment requirements (e.g. physical sector sizes that are a multiple of the logical sector size)
- Uses SI units (byte multiples of 1000), supporting arbitrary specification of disk locations in sectors, bytes, kilobytes, megabytes, gigabytes, cylinders and CHS notation
- Knows about, detects and works around quirks of other partitioning tools and operating system implementations
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Operating System Support
- GNU/Linux
- GNU/Hurd
- BeOS
- FreeBSD
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Disk Label (Partition Table) support
- Intel EFI/GPT parition tables
- MS-DOS partition tables
- Raw access (useful for RAID/LVM)
- MIPS/DVH partition tables
- Amiga partition tables
- PC98 partition tabled
- Sun disk labels
- BSD disk labels (Linux-style; currently broken from a BSD view)
- Macintosh parition maps
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Supported Filesystems
Note: Based on the fact that parted is a partition editor and not a filesystem editor, the removal of the filesystem support is currently being discussed. Moreover, parted does not have support for lots of filesystem options that are available when using filesystem specific applications. Finally, the filesystem support in parted is known to be buggy and unreliable. The parted project will, however, maintain the filesystem code that is necessary for some partition related actions (like resizing). These are all changes that are planned for the next major release of parted.
| File system | Detect | Create | Resize | Copy | Check |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| ext2 | * | * | *1 | *2 | *3 |
| ext3 | * | *1 | *2 | *3 | |
| ext4 | |||||
| FAT16 | * | * | *4 | *4 | * |
| FAT32 | * | * | * | * | * |
| linux-swap | * | * | * | * | * |
| HFS / HFS+ | * | *1,5 | |||
| JFS | * | ||||
| NTFS | * | ||||
| ReiserFS | * | *6 | *1,6 | *6 | *3,6 |
| UFS | * | ||||
| XFS | * |
- The start of the partition must stay fixed.
- The partition you copy to must be bigger or exactly the same size as the partition you copy from.
- Limited checking is done when the file system is opened. This is the only checking at the moment. All commands (including resize) will gracefully fail, leaving the file system intact, if there are any errors.
- You can always shrink your partition. If you can't use FAT32 for some reason, you may not be able to grow your partition due to restrictions in cluster size.
- Parted can only shrink HFS and HFS+ filesystems.
- ReiserFS support is enabled if you install libreiserfs, available here.