HowTo Create A GPT Disk With EFI System And exFAT Partitions Using Parted

Overview

The purpose of this article is to create a disk that can be read / written to by all major operating systems (i.e., macOS, Windows and Linux). A removable USB storage device containing SSD SATA or NVMe media formatted with an exFAT partition can be used to accomplish this. At the time of this writing, January 02, 2020, a removable USB-C drive containing a CORSAIR FORCE Series MP500 120GB NVMe storage device will be demonstrated.

The USB drive is attached to an NST system as device: "/dev/sdc". The parted disk utility will be used to create the GUID Partition Table (GPT) disk label, the EFI System Partition and the exFAT partition.

Zero Out Previous Disk Label - Optional

This optional step will zero out any previous disk label. We will use the dcfldd utility. The first 1GB of the disk will be zeroed out:

[root@shopper2 ~]# dcfldd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdc statusinterval=64 bs=1M count=1k;
1024 blocks (1024Mb) written.
1024+0 records in
1024+0 records out
[root@shopper2 ~]#

We can now used parted to examine the disk and see that we are starting out with an "unrecognized" disk structure:

[root@shopper2 ~]# /sbin/parted -s /dev/sdc print;
Error: /dev/sdc: unrecognised disk label
Model: JM583  (scsi)
Disk /dev/sdc: 120GB
Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/512B
Partition Table: unknown
Disk Flags: 
[root@shopper2 ~]#