GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 337008
Allow changing of the MBR partition type label (without otherwise altering the partition)
Last modified: 2010-04-12 17:31:49 UTC
Allow changing of the partition's type in the MBR, without otherwise changing the partition. For example, allow the user to change a partition's reported type from 42 (SFS) to 7 (NTFS). Rationale (see bug 337007 for more details): When disks are marked as dynamic in Windows, it sets the partition type to SFS (42) in the MBR. The partitions are still NTFS (or at least often are), but because the MBR type doesn't match the detected fs type, gparted does not allow the partition to be altered. The problem can be fixed by changing the type with fdisk, but it would be nice to be able to do this in gparted.
This feature is really important - sometimes other disk partitioning tools sets incorrect partition type and in gparted there are no way to correct this problem without reformating whole partition (and loosing all info in that partition) That's why I sometimes nedd cfdisk and use it instead of gparted ;)
Yes, i needed this feature recently too, so i had to use fdisk.
GParted uses the libparted library from the Parted project to detect and manipulate partition tables. Hence GParted depends on libparted for the ability to set the partition type identifier. To add this capability to GParted first requires the capability to be added to Parted. If you still desire this capability, I suggest you raise this request with the Parted team, such as on the following mailing list: parted-devel@lists.alioth.debian.org Please respond with a link to the mailing list request if you do choose this route.
Matthias, Mantas, Max: Please reopen with the link as mentioned in comment #3. Thanks in advance.