It should go without saying, though I’ll say it anyway, that you should back up any crucial data before making any modifications to the partitions on your drives. GParted will ask a few questions about your language and display preferences - I just picked the VESA driver, which worked just fine - and then boots into Fluxbox with GParted running. It’s a tiny image - less than 30MB - so it’ll fit on a business card CD, if you like that sort of thing. Just download the ISO image, burn it to a CD, and boot up the target machine using the CD. Using the live CD is as easy as falling off a bike.

It’s possible to run GParted from a normal distribution - for example, GParted is available in the Ubuntu repositories - but it’s pretty useful to have on a live CD that lets you make changes to all the partitions without worrying about having any of them mounted. You might only use the CD every few months, but it’s a good thing to have handy when you need it.įor example, if you’re installing Fedora Core onto a system that already has an NTFS partition - say, to get your boss to try Linux - you’ll need a separate utility to do the partitioning, because Fedora’s installer doesn’t handle partition resizing. This is the kind of thing that almost any admin or power user will want to have in his toolbox. The GParted live CD bundles GParted, the Fluxbox window manager, and a minimal set of tools to provide a single-purpose Linux distro for working with disk partitions. GParted is actually a front end for GNU Parted, but it’s much easier to use GParted’s interface than the command line utility. See the features page on the GParted site for the full rundown on GParted’s capabilities. At a bare minimum, GParted can detect, read, copy, and create partitions using those file systems - and, in some cases, can shrink, expand, and move partitions. GParted handles Ext2, Ext3, FAT16, FAT32, JFS, ReiserFS, Reiser4, NTFS, XFS, and other filesystem formats. The GParted team released the GParted live CD version 0.2.4-2 this month, so I decided it was a good time to take GParted for a spin. Need a way to resize NTFS partitions, mirror disk images, or otherwise muck about with disk partitions - and don’t want to use a proprietary package like Partition Magic? If so, the GNOME Partition Editor (GParted) is an excellent open source tool for the task.

Gparted livecd