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What kinds of problems will occur by deleting partitions with fdisk that are currently mounted. I tested this on a mounted usb partition and it gave me some peculiar errors. I know it is something you shouldn't do, just curious as to why.

David Hallman
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  • I mean using fdisk to delete a partition that is currently mounted. – David Hallman Feb 19 '15 at 09:49
  • On second reading of your original question, I understood what you we trying to do and deleted my comment. But with your edit there is less change of a human parser error. – Anthon Feb 19 '15 at 09:55
  • If my memmory serves me well, if you do that when you write changes and exit fdisk it will warn you that no changes will take effect until you unmount the drive. – YoMismo Feb 19 '15 at 11:11

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Initially you might not notice anything as the kernel does not necessarily notice changes in the partition table. That is why you get prompted by fdisk that you have to reboot the system e.g. if you changed the partitions on the disc you booted from (you can however notify the kernel with a program of that).

If the in (kernel-)memory and on disc partition layouts do not correspond the kernel happily writes where it probably would not be able to read after a reboot and reread of the partition information.

slm
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Anthon
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