fdisk

This is a simple guide, part of a series I'll call 'How-To Guide Without Ads'. In it, I'm going to document how I partition, format, and mount a large disk (2TB+) in Linux with parted.

Note that newer fdisk versions may work better with giant drives... but since I'm now used to parted I'm sticking with it for the foreseeable future.

List all available drives

$ sudo parted -l
...
Error: /dev/sda: unrecognised disk label
Model: ATA Samsung SSD 870 (scsi)                                         
Disk /dev/sda: 8002GB
Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/512B
Partition Table: unknown
Disk Flags:

Good, I had plugged in that SSD just now, and it's brand new, so it doesn't have a partition table, label, or anything. It's the one I want to operate on. It's located at /dev/sda. I could also find that info with lsblk.

To use the built-in 8GB of eMMC storage on the Orange Pi Plus as a writable volume in Linux, you need to delete the existing partitions (I think mine were formatted as FAT/WIN32), create a new partition, format the partition, then mount it:

1. Delete the existing partitions:
   1. sudo fdisk /dev/mmcblk1
   2. p to list all partitions, then d and a number to delete all existing partitions, then w to write the changes.
2. Create a new partition:
   1. sudo fdisk /dev/mmcblk1
   2. n to create a new partition, then use all the defaults, then w to write the changes.
3. Format the partition: sudo mkfs.ext4 -L "emmc" /dev/mmcblk1p1
4. Create a mount point: sudo mkdir /emmc
5. Mount the disk: mount /dev/mmcblk1p1 /emmc