Deciding how to partition a hard drive is not necessarily a simple task. Depending on what you want to do with it, your partitioning scheme may vary greatly. For those with specific needs I put forward a practical tip: Make all your operating system partitions the exact same size. I’ve learned the value of this several times over in situations that called for experimentation/backup with/for an operating system.

I will use the *nix tools fdisk (the Windows version of fdisk will not suffice) and dd, and consequentially assume that the reader has minimal *nix experience and access to some form of a *nix like system. Linux live CDs are adequate, as will (I believe) OSX. The *nix system will be used to perform the delicate initial partitioning and the partition clones thereafter.

I always dual-boot Windows and Linux, keep a third partition around for experimenting with other operating systems, and have a fourth partition blank. All four of these partitions are the exact same size, which offers me flexibility in moving them around. The biggest advantage is that it allows me to perform a byte-for-byte clone any one partition onto a second partition, perform whatever perverse thing I’m experimenting with on the first partition, and then restore it if something goes wrong. Or I can just boot straight to the new copy of the partition I cloned. Somewhat time consuming, but simple and error-proof.

I know this concept may strike some as a waste of time and space, but it’s not inefficient as it may sound. Cloning a 20GB partition can be done over lunch and, like many others, I have a hard disk exclusively devoted to operating systems, no one of which needs more than 25GB.

There are several reasons why you might want to backup an entire partition. The need to do so for a *nix system is less pronounced, because the flexibility of *nix systems lets you do a file-level copy between partitions without adverse effects. But doing a byte-for-byte direct copy isn’t much longer than a file-based copy, and removes any of the file-based copy complications. As well, Windows systems are attached to their partitions and if they are copied on the file level to a new file system they will not work, so doing a byte-by-byte image of a Windows system is almost a must for backup purposes.

The problem, though, is that if you rely on a partition manager like the default Windows manager or GParted (which is the default partition manager in the Ubuntu installation process) to create your partitions for you, as odd as it may seem, you aren’t guaranteed to get partitions the exact size you specified. I don’t know the details, but creating two 20GB partitions does not guarantee you of getting two partitions of the same size. Thus when you go back to try and clone one partition to another you may discover that the destination partition is, say, 8MB smaller than the source partition, and there will be hell to pay.

Open the disk to partition with fisk:

# fdisk /dev/sda

Use the “p” command to get a printout of my current table. If the disk is new, the printout should be empty.

Determine how large you wish the partitions to be. Create a new partition and choose the starting first sector (use the default if you are creating them sequentially). Then select the last sector by using the +XG to indicate that the last sector should be X gigabytes worth of sectors after the first. This should work with both primary and extended partitions, with one exception noted below.

Exception: There is a special partition that requires a non-default starting sector. The first partition within an extended partition will start in the same cylinder as the extended partition marker, and thus share some space with said marker and not be the exact size specified. To correct this, create the first “inner” extended partition one sector after the beginning of the “outer” extended partition. This will result in a few bytes of wasted space, but if both partitions start on the same sector then size of the final partition will be slightly too small.

• Decide which partition will be the source and which will be the destination. Use dd to copy from the source to the destination:
  # dd if=/dev/sda2 of=/dev/sda4 bs=8M
  A key parameter here is the “bs” option, which tells dd how many bytes to read and write each time. Read/write operations to disks are relatively slow and have significant overhead so you want to make each read/write operation worth your computer’s time. I’ve found 8MB to be about the most efficient block size to use for each read and write. If you fail to specify a value then the default of 512 bytes will be used, this can make the process take on the order of 100 times longer to finish.

Obviously, copying partitions also applies to copying entire disks if the disks are the exact same size. This can be used make manual backups of entire drives.