Submitted by “Are you in need of a great partitioner? Don’t want to spend lots of cash for the popular commercial products? The GParted LiveCD offers most of the features that the big boys do, and even some that they don’t. The key benefit? This is free.”
“Are you in need of a great partitioner? Don’t want to spend lots of cash for the popular commercial products? The GParted LiveCD offers most of the features that the big boys do, and even some that they don’t. The key benefit? This is free.”
Should I recommend this to my friends who want to resize their ntfs partitions and make linux ones? I mean, is the ntfs partitioning stuff in this good now or is it still impossible to resize ntfs without corrupting it?
In July I resized (twice) with success a NTFS partition on a new notebook. No corruption or other problems.
Resizing NTFS non-destructively has been possible for years now. I believe ntfsresize was released in 2002. You’re probably thinking of writing to files in NTFS — a completely different matter.
Even so, whenever you make any type of changes to your parititions you should back up any important data.
Thanks
I could have sworn ntfs resizing was screwy… Ohhh No wonder… I started using linux in 2002 lol. Thanks 
I’m as committed to free = not as in beer as the next guy, but acronis works perfectly every time, is super easy to use….and was very cheap, both absolutely and for what it does. Is this wrong?
It is true, the new screenshots look very nice.
Edited 2006-09-17 19:19
FTA: “In Linux especially! Since there is no way to defrag the hard drive, things are sure to get fragmented down the road.”
I don’t think he’s using the word “fragmented” correctly. The reason for partitioning UNIX and Unix-like operating systems into multiple partitions is more about organization and security.
For example, if you have 1 big partition for the entire system, any user could fill up /tmp with garbage and since the entire system is in 1 partition, it would prevent log files from being written, and in general, the system wouldn’t run properly.
You also partition so you can use different mount options for different parts of the file system. For example, using nosuid for the /home partition.
But as far as file fragmentation goes, where a large file is broken up into fragmented parts and spread out over the hard-drive, that’s just not an issue with ext2, ext3, ReiserFS, etc…
Can you make a RAID partition with this? I tried the gparted on the Dapper livecd and you can’t.
I can suggest this to anyone. When I bought a new SATA HD two months ago I had to use the GParted Live CD, because the Norton Partition Magic 8.05 failed to move my partitions to the new drive. Let face it, Partition Magic is totally out-dated.
So, it was brilliant. I was able to do what I wanted.
Love Gparted, been my only partitioning tool for quite a while. Great functionality!
http://gparted.sourceforge.net/
Yes, loading Live CD is bit more trickier than previous versions. But things you get outweights all troubles.It is the must-have tool for anybody trying to do these tricky things with partitioning.
but how does it compares with SystemRescueCD (http://www.sysresccd.org/)?
I allways keep some boot CD’s with me for almost any emergency, mainly customized versions of BartPE and UBCD and also SystemRescueCD. Guess I’m going to carry one more.
PS. Looks like Gparted is a bit more up-to-date. Going to check after downloading.
SystemRescueCD is, as the name itself indicates, not only used for disk patitioning but also for a lot of others tasks. It is a good tool to have around.
PS.: Before someone ask, I have no relation to the project, just like it 😉
The gparted livecd mainly is centered around gparted program while as you hinted at later, SysRescueCD is more of a swiss-army knife of rescue/admin tools. SysRescueCD has qtparted (gparted and qtparted are all frontends for parted) on it, but SysRescueCD is not updated frequently.
I prefer to make my own livecd instead of waiting for SysRescueCD to update theirs. Of course you can attempt to remaster the SysRescueCD with updated apps, but Debian provides and easier way to build you own livecd of rescue tools:
http://live.debian.net/wiki/
Well, I’m not a Debian user, but it is an instructive reading anyway. Thanks.
I did resize partitions on my drive a couple of days ago. Change one FAT32 and one EXT3 partition. Everything went smoothly.
Nice tool for someone like who is used to Partition Magic. The GUI had some occasional glitches, but I was lazy and didn’t really bother experimenting with choosing the right video driver and resolution.
I dislike the fact that, it doesn’t support partition labels. I have several distros installed on my machine, and its nice to be able to have LABEL=suse10.1-root in my /etc/fstab rather than /dev/hda6, it make it far easier to shuffle partitions around. Fedora and Suse partition tools both provide partition label support. Also after I’ve finished with a partition I’ll label it (e2label /dev/hda7 spare), then when I come to install I clearly know what partition to make my new root system.
I personally have used partition magic in the past, but nowadays use Acronis Disk Suite, which I find very useful, and value for money (I really need to trust a partition moving tool)
Paragon Partitioner, version 6.0 has lots more features, but some minor issues.
Unfortunately none of the free or commercial gui partitioning tools seem to support LVM 🙁
The other thing I don’t like about gparted (using the USB version), is that it just asks too many questions before starting into gui-mode, it should be more like Knoppix and just work! I’ve occasions, when I put in the correct X information, but it failed to start the gui.
I’m not quite sure what you mean. If – as you say – partition labels are located in /etc/fstab, then the liveCD can’t use labels because… well… it’s a liveCD. It doesn’t host an fstab for you system.
I think the concept of GParted looks promising: To do one (very vital task) and nothing else.
No partition labels are written into the partition table, or at the beginning of each partition, the /etc/fstab syntax provides many different ways to refer to a partition quiting fstab(5)
Instead of giving the device explicitly, one may indicate the (ext2 or
xfs) filesystem that is to be mounted by its UUID or volume label (cf.
e2label(8) or xfs_admin(8)), writing LABEL=<label> or UUID=<uuid>,
e.g., LABEL=Boot or UUID=3e6be9de
-8139-11d1-9106-a43f08d823a6.
This will make the system more robust: adding or removing a SCSI disk
changes the disk device name but not the filesystem volume label.
The LiveCD *should* have no problems reading labels.