Description of problem: I have /dev/sda1 which is a so called biosboot partition and blkid only shows the UUID for it: # blkid /dev/sda1 /dev/sda1: PARTUUID="990fa6f6-634a-4097-ab48-4215b1a74ffc" # parted -l Model: ATA WDC WD1002FAEX-0 (scsi) Disk /dev/sda: 1000GB Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/512B Partition Table: gpt Disk Flags: pmbr_boot Number Start End Size File system Name Flags 1 1049kB 2097kB 1049kB bios_grub 2 2097kB 526MB 524MB xfs 3 526MB 1000GB 1000GB lvm ... skip ... # fdisk -l WARNING: fdisk GPT support is currently new, and therefore in an experimental phase. Use at your own discretion. Disk /dev/sda: 1000.2 GB, 1000204886016 bytes, 1953525168 sectors Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes Disk label type: gpt # Start End Size Type Name 1 2048 4095 1M BIOS boot parti 2 4096 1028095 500M Microsoft basic 3 1028096 1953523711 931G Linux LVM Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): util-linux-2.23.2-26.el7.x86_64 How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. Install a non UEFI x86_64 system with gpt on the kernel command line during install. 2. Selected automatic partitioning. 3. Actual results: blkid doesn't give us any indication that sda1 is a biosboot partition. Expected results: The opposite. Additional info: I'm working on a test which uses blkid output and this is a corner case which isn't covered. blkid is very handy in bash scripts and we need it to somehow identify biosboot partitions.
*** Bug 1287613 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
It depends what are you looking for, I guess (also according to bug #128761) you want to check partition type. GPT uses GUIDs: "Partition type GUIDs" at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GUID_Partition_Table blkid provides this by blkid -p -o udev /dev/sda1 as ID_PART_ENTRY_TYPE= variable, but this is expensive root-only method (it probes for many another things). It's better to reuse information already gathered in udev db, lsblk -n -o PARTTYPE /dev/sda1 or if you really want to read the data directly from the device (system without udev, etc.) than use: partx -g -o TYPE /dev/sda1 but recommended is lsblk. Note that GPT also uses special flags for mark partition as LegacyBIOSBootable (in your parted output), this is provided by blkid as ID_PART_ENTRY_FLAGS=, by partx as FLAGS and by lsblk as PARTFLAGS, in all cases as hex $ lsblk -n -o PARTFLAGS /dev/sdc1 0x4 Note the same variable is used for MBR flags. See wikipedia about GPT, section "Partition attributes". on fedora (>=f22) you can use fdisk/sfdisk to translate the flag to human readable string: # sfdisk --part-attrs /dev/sdc 1 LegacyBIOSBootable ... note that I don't plan extend libblkid to translate the flags (so WONTFIX, sorry).