Developer(s) | Robert Baron, IBM, Microsoft, Digital Research, Datalight, Novell, Brian E. Reifsnyder |
---|---|
Initial release | 1983, 40–41 years ago |
Operating system | MS-DOS, PC DOS, FlexOS, SISNE plus, OS/2, eComStation, ArcaOS, Windows, DR DOS, ROM-DOS, FreeDOS, PTS-DOS, * BSD, [1] SysV |
Type | Command |
License | MS-DOS, PC DOS, FlexOS, OS/2, Windows, DR DOS, ROM-DOS, PTS-DOS:
Proprietary
commercial software FreeDOS: GNU GPLv2 |
fdisk is a
command-line utility for
disk partitioning. It has been part of
DOS,
DR
FlexOS,
IBM
OS/2, and early versions of
Microsoft Windows, as well as certain ports of
FreeBSD,
[2]
NetBSD,
[3]
OpenBSD,
[4]
DragonFly BSD
[5] and
macOS
[6] for compatibility reasons.
Windows 2000 and its successors have replaced fdisk
with a more advanced tool called
diskpart
.
IBM introduced the first version of fdisk
(officially dubbed "Fixed Disk Setup Program") in March 1983, with the release of the
IBM PC/XT computer (the first PC to store data on a
hard disk) and the
IBM PC DOS 2.0 operating system. fdisk
version 1.0 can create one
FAT12 partition, delete it, change the
active partition, or display partition data. fdisk
writes the
master boot record, which supports up to four partitions. The other three were intended for other operating systems such as
CP/M-86 and
Xenix, which were expected to have their own partitioning utilities.
Microsoft first added fdisk
to
MS-DOS in version 3.2.
[7] MS-DOS versions 2.0 through 3.10 included OEM-specific partitioning tools, which may have been named fdisk
.
PC DOS 3.0, released in August 1984, added support for
FAT16 partitions to handle larger hard disks more efficiently. PC DOS 3.30, released in April 1987, added support for
extended partitions. (These partitions do not store data directly but can contain up to 23
logical drives.) In both cases, fdisk
was modified to work with FAT16 and extended partitions. Support for
FAT16B was first added to Compaq's fdisk
in MS-DOS 3.31. FAT16B later became available with MS-DOS and PC DOS 4.0.
The undocumented /mbr
switch in fdisk
, which could repair the
master boot record, soon became popular.
IBM PC DOS 7.10 shipped with the new fdisk32
utility.
ROM-DOS,
[8]
DR DOS 6.0
[9]
FlexOS,
[10]
PTS-DOS 2000 Pro,
[11] and
FreeDOS,
[12] include an implementation of the fdisk
command.
Windows 95,
Windows 98, and
Windows ME shipped with a derivative of the MS-DOS fdisk
.
Windows 2000 and its successors, however, came with the more advanced
diskpart
and the graphical
Disk Management utilities.
Starting with Windows 95 OSR2, fdisk
supports the
FAT32 file system.
[13]
The version of fdisk
that ships with Windows 95 does not report the correct size of a hard disk that is larger than 64 GB. An updated fdisk
is available from Microsoft to correct this issue.
[14] In addition, fdisk
cannot create partitions larger than 512 GB, even though FAT32 supports partitions as big as 2 TB. This limitation applies to all versions of fdisk
supplied with Windows 95 OSR 2.1, Windows 98 and Windows ME.
Before version 4.0, OS/2 shipped with two partition table managers. These were the text mode fdisk [15] and the graphical fdiskpm. [16] The two have identical functionality, and can manipulate both FAT partitions and the more advanced HPFS partitions.
OS/2 4.5 and higher (including
eComStation and
ArcaOS) can use the
JFS file system, as well as FAT and HPFS. They replaced fdisk
with the
Logical Volume Manager (LVM).
fdisk
for
Mach Operating System was written by Robert Baron. It was ported to
386BSD by Julian Elischer,
[17] and the implementation is being used by
FreeBSD,
[2]
NetBSD
[3] and
DragonFly BSD,
[5] all as of 2019, as well as the early versions of
OpenBSD between 1995 and 1997 before OpenBSD 2.2.
[1]
Tobias Weingartner re-wrote fdisk
in 1997 before OpenBSD 2.2,
[4] which has subsequently been forked by
Apple Computer, Inc in 2002, and is still used as the basis for fdisk
on macOS as of 2019.
[6]
For native partitions, BSD systems traditionally use
BSD disklabel, and fdisk
partitioning is supported only on certain architectures (for compatibility reasons) and only in addition to the BSD disklabel (which is mandatory).
In Linux, fdisk
is a part of a standard package distributed by the Linux Kernel organization,
util-linux
. The original program was written by Andries E. Brouwer and A. V. Le Blanc and was later rewritten by Karel Zak and Davidlohr Bueso when they forked the util-linux
package in 2006. An alternative,
ncurses-based program,
cfdisk, allows users to create partition layouts via a
text-based user interface (TUI).
[18]