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2. Volumes

2.1 PC Partitions

GNU parted

GNU parted can create, destroy, resize, copy and move partitions, and the filesystems on them. It currently supports Ext2, FAT16, FAT32 and Linux-swap.

Filesystem      detect  create  resize  copy    check
ext2            *               *               *1
fat             *       *       *2      *2      *
linux-swap      *       *       *       *

NOTES:

1 Limited checking is done when the filesystem is opened. This is the only checking at the moment. All commands (including resize) will gracefully fail, leaving the filesystem in tact, if there is are any errors in the file system (and the vast majority of errors in general).

2 The size of the new partition, after resizing or copying, is restricted by the cluster size. This is worse than you think, because you don't get to choose your cluster size (it's a bug in Windows, and you want compatibility, right?).

2.2 Other partitions

2.3 Unix slices

2.4 Windows NT volumes

This linux-kernel driver allows you to access and mount linear and stripe set volumes.

2.5 MD - Multiple Devices driver for Linux

This driver lets you combine several hard disk partitions into one logical block device. This can be used to simply append one partition to another one or to combine several redundant hard disks to a RAID1/4/5 device so as to provide protection against hard disk failures. This is called "Software RAID" since the combining of the partitions is done by the kernel.

2.6 LVM - Logical Volume Manager

The LVM was originally developed by Veritas (see http://www.veritas.com).

Linux implementation is available here:

2.7 OS/2 LVM

Logical Volume Manager is available in OS/2 WarpServer 5. It allows you to create linear volumes on several disks/partitions.

2.8 Novell NetWare volumes

NetWare volumes are used for NWFS-386 filesystem.

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