pdisk - a simple partitioner

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Status of pdisk (as of 2003-04-09)

The current version of pdisk is 0.8a2. That version was released 2000-05-16.

Where to get pdisk

You should have gotten the linux version of pdisk with your PPC Linux distribution. The Classic MacOS version should be available from the same source. Or from me at my ftp site. Or through the distribution web page. Mac OS X has it's own version of pdisk. It branched off from my sources in 1997. I don't have anything to do with it. The Debian mac-fdisk is actually a crufty old version of pdisk from a MkLinux distribution that predates even the Mac OS X version.

What else is here

how to use pdisk?
really need to have a document from the point of view of someone who hasn't needed to worry about this stuff before. Most people don't know beans about partitioning and don't want to. They want to know what they should do to get their disk set up correctly.
MacOS pdisk documentation as distributed with source.
Linux pdisk man page as distributed.
The hidden debug features of pdisk.
Questions and Answers about pdisk.
An introduction to the mysteries of MacOS bootable CDs.

History of pdisk

The first version of pdisk was written in late 1996 when I was a member of the MkLinux team at Apple Computer. Since pdisk provides some functionality that other MacOS partitioners don't, a simplistic port was done to the MacOS, using some generic SCSI access code written by another programmer at Apple.

In January 1997 I got hijacked onto the Rhapsody project. I did a quick initial port to Rhapsody/Darwin/MacOS X and then nothing happened for a while.

In December 1997, I added support for ATA/ATAPI devices to the MacOS version of pdisk. Various other small changes worked in during early 1998 and then it languished for a long time.

In February 2000, I finally got a machine to run LinuxPPC on. I worked on pdisk some and put a distribution together in May. Since then I haven't really done anything with it.

What next?

These days I don't even run Linux anymore. I get maybe one email about pdisk a month if that.

Last Updated: 2003-08-28