Many partition table manipulators are known as fdisk. Before use, hard disks must be divided into one or more logical disks called partitions. This division is described in the partition table found in sector 0 of the disk.

DOS fdisk

All the many DOS operating systems, including MS-DOS, PC-DOS and DR-DOS use a partition table manipulator known as fdisk. The name derives from IBM's habit of calling hard drives fixed disks. DOS fdisk programs are only capable of creating the FAT type partitions that DOS uses.

A derivative of the MS-DOS fdisk was provided with Windows 95, Windows 98, and Windows Me. Versions shipping with Windows 95B and higher were able to manipulate FAT32 partitions.

Linux fdisk

Linux needs at least one partition, namely for its root file system. It can use swap files and/or swap partitions, but the latter are more efficient. So, usually one will want a second Linux partition dedicated as a swap partition. On Intel compatible hardware, the BIOS that boots the system can often only access the first 1024 cylinders of the disk. For this reason people with large disks often create a third partition, just a few MB large, typically mounted on /boot, to store the kernel image and a few auxiliary files needed at boot time, so as to make sure that this stuff is accessible to the BIOS. There may be reasons of security, ease of administration and backup, or testing, to use more than the minimum number of partitions. See also: cfdisk.

OS/2 fdisk

OS/2 shipped with two partition table managers up until version 4.0. These were the text mode fdisk and the GUI-based fdiskpm. The two have identical functionality, and can manipulate both FAT partitions and the more advanced HPFS partitions.

OS/2 versions 4.5 and higher (including EcomStation ) can use the JFS filesystem as well as FAT and HPFS, and replace fdisk with the Logical Volume Manager, LVM.