There is one more option that's useful in “a”, which sets a partition as bootable. The bootable tag is useful because at boot, if no boot manager is running, control is transferred to the partition with the bootable flag set.

Is fdisk the only option?

A friendlier interface can be seen with cfdisk. This is not just fdisk wrapped in a ncurses interface. And, it's not just a prettier interface. It's actually more competent than fdisk and some of the experiences that we've had with cfdisk, do bear these statements out. Why are we writing about fdisk then? Well, fdisk is what most distributions - Debian is one notable exception - provide as the alternate to their own front-ends. Red Hat and SuSE both give you only fdisk as the other option to their own partitioning tools. In most cases, you will want to use cfdisk. Cfdisk also supports most of the commands that fdisk does, so most of the above is applicable there too.

There's also a sfdisk for macho freaks. It's totally command-line driven and is supposed to be the most powerful tool of the lot. We've not used this very often and luckily never faced a situation requiring sfdisk. Our thought when we see sfdisk -- "HELP".

After this cursory look at fdisk you will agree that using it is not very difficult. All it needs a little getting used to. And as they say, ‘Practice makes Perfect’.