linuxexpert-practice-labs/labs/lpic-1/104-1-partitions-and-filesystems

LPIC-1 104.1: Creating partitions and filesystems

Partitioning with fdisk and parted, ext4 and XFS with labels, a swap partition, wiping a disk, and Btrfs subvolumes and snapshots.

Before you start

The lab adds two empty 4 GiB spare disks, /dev/loop40 and /dev/loop41 (the chapter's /dev/sdb and /dev/sdc). Their partitions show up as /dev/loop40p1 and so on. It installs the Btrfs tools if they're missing. Task 5 needs Btrfs, which AlmaLinux 10 and Ubuntu have but RHEL and Rocky Linux leave out, so the lab won't start there. Swap you turn on by hand is off again after a reboot, so check before you reboot.

Tasks

1. Partition /dev/loop40 as GPT with fdisk: a 1 GiB partition, a 512 MiB partition with the swap type, and the rest. Print the table before writing.
2. Put ext4 on the first partition and XFS on the third, each with a label. Run lsblk -f to see them.
3. Turn the second partition into swap, enable it, and check with swapon --show and free -h.
4. Give /dev/loop41 a GPT table and one partition with parted, and notice that nothing asks you to confirm a write. Then clear it with wipefs -a /dev/loop41. Check it yourself: wipefs /dev/loop41 lists nothing afterwards.
5. Make a Btrfs filesystem on /dev/loop41, create a subvolume, write a file, snapshot the subvolume, delete the file, and find it again in the snapshot.

Hints

• In fdisk: g (new GPT table), n (sizes as +1G, +512M), t (type swap or 19), p, w.
• mkfs.ext4 -L, mkfs.xfs -L; lsblk -f.
• mkswap, swapon, swapon --show, free -h.
• parted -s /dev/loop41 mklabel gpt mkpart one 1MiB 100%; wipefs -a.
• mkfs.btrfs, mount it, btrfs subvolume create, btrfs subvolume snapshot, btrfs subvolume list.