IBM introduced the first version of fdisk (officially dubbed "Fixed Disk Setup Program") in March 1983, with the release of the IBM PC/XT computer (the first PC to store data on a hard disk) and the IBM PC DOS 2.0 operating system. fdisk version 1.0 can create one FAT12 partition, delete it, change the active partition, or display partition data. fdisk writes the master boot record, which supports up to four partitions. The other three were intended for other operating systems such as CP/M-86 and Xenix, which were expected to have their own partitioning utilities.
Microsoft first added fdisk to MS-DOS in version 3.2.[7] MS-DOS versions 2.0 through 3.10 included OEM-specific partitioning tools, which may have been named fdisk.
PC DOS 3.0, released in August 1984, added support for FAT16 partitions to handle larger hard disks more efficiently. PC DOS 3.30, released in April 1987, added support for extended partitions. (These partitions do not store data directly but can contain up to 23 logical drives.) In both cases, fdisk was modified to work with FAT16 and extended partitions. Support for FAT16B was first added to Compaq's fdisk in MS-DOS 3.31. FAT16B later became available with MS-DOS and PC DOS 4.0.
The undocumented /mbr switch in fdisk, which could repair the master boot record, soon became popular.
IBM PC DOS 7.10 shipped with the new fdisk32 utility.
Starting with Windows 95 OSR2, fdisk supports the FAT32 file system.[13]
The version of fdisk that ships with Windows 95 does not report the correct size of a hard disk that is larger than 64 GB. An updated fdisk is available from Microsoft to correct this issue.[14] In addition, fdisk cannot create partitions larger than 512 GB, even though FAT32 supports partitions as big as 2 TB. This limitation applies to all versions of fdisk supplied with Windows 95 OSR 2.1, Windows 98 and Windows ME.
IBM OS/2
Before version 4.0, OS/2 shipped with two partition table managers. These were the text modefdisk[15] and the graphicalfdiskpm.[16] The two have identical functionality, and can manipulate both FAT partitions and the more advanced HPFS partitions.
Tobias Weingartner re-wrote fdisk in 1997 before OpenBSD 2.2,[4] which has subsequently been forked by Apple Computer, Inc in 2002, and is still used as the basis for fdisk on macOS as of 2019.[6]
For native partitions, BSD systems traditionally use BSD disklabel, and fdisk partitioning is supported only on certain architectures (for compatibility reasons) and only in addition to the BSD disklabel (which is mandatory).
Linux
In Linux, fdisk is a part of a standard package distributed by the Linux Kernel organization, util-linux. The original program was written by Andries E. Brouwer and A. V. Le Blanc and was later rewritten by Karel Zak and Davidlohr Bueso when they forked the util-linux package in 2006. An alternative, ncurses-based program, cfdisk, allows users to create partition layouts via a text-based user interface (TUI).[18]