Question
/dev/vda: unrecognized partition table type
- Posted on February 24, 2015
Asked by guilhermegeek
Hi,
Today i had to create a swap because i had problems with a php package manager - composer - when updating the dependencies because it didn’t have enough free memory. I’ve created it on /var/swap.1 with the following commands:
/bin/dd if=/dev/zero of=/var/swap.1 bs=1M count=1024
/sbin/mkswap /var/swap.1
/sbin/swapon /var/swap.1
After this the composer updated the dependencies successfully as expected. After that i runned fdisk to check the partitions and now i’m getting invalid partition table:
Disk /dev/vda: 41610 cylinders, 16 heads, 63 sectors/track
sfdisk: ERROR: sector 0 does not have an msdos signature
/dev/vda: unrecognized partition table type
No partitions found
Is this something i should worry about? It’s a VPS with 512MB running debian 7.
Thanks in advance
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It’s not saying the partition table is invalid, it’s saying there’s no signature on sector 0 and that the type is unrecognized. This is because, as stated in sfdisk’s manpage:
“sfdisk doesn’t understand the GUID Partition Table (GPT) format and it is not designed for large partitions. In these cases use the more advanced GNU parted(8).”
And if you use parted, as indicated by the manual: