Older version of sfdisk may still be used for msdos partition tables.
To copy the partition table from one disk to another using sfdisk a temporary file should be used to store the data for the partition table.
Here is an example of how to copy the msdos partition table from disk sda to disk sdb! Two simple commands
- Dump the source (sda) partition table to a temporary file.
- Redirect the standard input of the sfdisk utility with the above temporary file.
A copying partition table is really useful when recovering from a drive failure in a Linux software raid. Sometimes it is difficult or just easier to create the exact layout as the source mirror disk!
mdadm --add /dev/md1 /dev/sdb2 mdadm: /dev/sdb2 not large enough to join array
Errors such as the above are easily resolved with just two commands. The new versions of disk programs align the partitions, which may be a problem for a software RAID to join in a partition.
STEP 1) Dump the source partition table.
The source partition table is from /dev/sda:
[root@srv ~]# sfdisk -d /dev/sda > part_table_sda sfdisk: Warning: extended partition does not start at a cylinder boundary. DOS and Linux will interpret the contents differently.
There is a warning about not aligned partition, which may cause problems when creating from scratch, so copying the partition table is the best option in such cases.
Here is what the temporary file part_table_sda with the partition table information contains:
[root@srv ~]# cat part_table_sda # partition table of /dev/sda unit: sectors /dev/sda1 : start= 2048, size= 67045376, Id=fd, bootable /dev/sda2 : start= 67110912, size= 1048576, Id=fd /dev/sda3 : start= 68159488, size= 62883840, Id=fd /dev/sda4 : start=131043328, size=845729792, Id= f /dev/sda5 : start=131076096, size=845434880, Id=fd