From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.1.11) Gecko/20071127 Firefox/2.0.0.11 Description of problem: The FC8 Rescue DVD image doesn't include sfdisk. sfdisk was on the FC6 Rescue CD, but maybe it just didn't fit on the DVD. :) Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: # find / -name sfdisk Actual Results: Expected Results: # find / -name sfdisk /sbin/sfdisk Additional info: The non-interactive mode of sfdisk is a key part of bare metal recovery, at least for me. Duplicating a complex partition table using fdisk is tedious.
What does sfdisk provide that parted does not?
To my knowledge, parted can't dump a partition table in a format that can be directly used to write a new partition table. With sfdisk I can dump the partition table to a backup, and then use that file during bare metal recovery to re-create the partitions on an identical disk: Dump partition table in sfdisk-readable format: # sfdisk -d /dev/sda > /mnt/backup/sda_partition_table.txt Restore partition table: # sfdisk /dev/sda < /mnt/backup/sda_partition_table.txt
sfdisk is not in the f9 version of RescueCD either. As stated in comment #2, sfdisk provides the easy functionality of saving and restoring a partition table.