If we’re dealing with GUID partitioning, all the partitions in GUID are just plain old partitions they’re all the same. There are no Primary, Extended or Logical Partitions.MBR and that’s because it has several key advantages that you see here. Now even though UEFI is only implemented on very late-model computers you can still use GPT partitioning on older Linux systems that still use a standard BIOS. Which is designed really to replace the BIOS on most computer systems and provide a better Software to Hardware interface.īasically, think of UEFI as a BIOS on steroids. Really GPT is a part of the overall Unified Extensible Firmware Interface or UEFI specification. It’s intended to be a replacement for the old MBR partitioning scheme.īy the way GPT stands for GUID Partition Table. It’s called the Globally Unique Identifier Partition (GUID) table scheme we just call it GUID or sometimes just GPT.

We need bigger disks and we need better performance out of our disks.Īccordingly, a new disk partitioning scheme is now available in Linux. Now all of these MBR workarounds have served us well for a really long time but frankly they’ve outlived their usefulness. In addition, we have started using 4 Kilobyte ( KB) sectors with MBR partitions in order to increase the maximum partition size on a particular disk.Īnd we’ve also started defining one of our available 4 partitions as an extended partition so it can hold many logical partitions. Now to address these limitations many patches workarounds and really downright Kluge’s have been implemented over the years to try to get around these MBR shortcomings such as using Logical Block Addressing or LBA this allows you to use larger hard disk drives. Today, well 2 Terabyte ( TB) drives are cheap you can go down to your local store and buy one. It’s been around for a very longtime it’s been around since the early 1980s.Īnd while it was great in its day, today it’s got a lot of limitations on a lot of short comings.įirst of all the Master Boot Record under MBR has to be installed in the first 512 bytes of the hard disk drive.Īnd you can only have four primary partitions on a single storage device and that is really limiting.Īlso the default block size used by MBR is 512 bytes and because of this an MBR partition on the hard drive can only be up to 2 Terabytes ( TB) in size.Īnd in 1980s that was a huge amount of space almost an unthinkable amount of space. The key problem here is that MBR has a lot of limitations. Now the GUID partitioning scheme is a newer partitioning scheme and we need to discuss why you’d want to use GUID partitions over older partitioning schemes such as MBR.

Creating and Managing GPT Disk Partitions.

Fdisk create gpt partition