7 Uses of GParted Live
Click image for larger view
I’ve been using GNU Parted to slice and dice my disk in preference to the fdisk for almost as long as I’ve been using Linux. We all fill up our hard-drives from time to time, but thanks to Gnome GParted, rearranging disk partitions isn’t as terrifying as it used to be. In fact, armed with a GParted Live CD, there’s a swathe of disk space fiddling jobs I can tackle without gnawing my fingers to the bone:
- When you’ve filled up your root partition, you can’t resize it while you’re booted from it. Reboot your machine from the GParted Live CD, and tinker even with your root partition.
- In the olden days, I used to keep
/homein a separate partition, so that I could change distro’s (or install a new release from CD without giving all my trust to the new Update Manager upgrade button) by wiping the root partition without touching any of my personal files in/home. Use the GParted Live CD to shrink your root partition, and create a new/home. Don’t forget to move the contents of your old/homedirectories before changing/etc/fstab! - When your VMWare virtual disk fills up, power it down and run vmware-vdiskmanager -x 12Gb Vista.vmdk to allocate some more space to the disk. In order to add the new space to an existing disk partition, boot VMWare into GParted Live and allocate the new unused space.
- When you’ve persuaded a friend to try Linux, as long as you promise they can still keep Windows around in case they decide to go back: don’t give them a slow Live CD, make some room for a new partition at the start of their drive for a full install.
- When you’re friend asks you to put things back how they were, delete the Linux partition, and add the freed space back to their main Windows partition.
- Stealing back some space from that unused Vista partition, to make room for keeping more mp3’s in Linux.
- Recycling the wasted disk space from a crashy old version of Windows ME into a bigger swap partition for Ubuntu.
Joking aside, it’s insanely helpful to have a GParted Live disk in your pocket when something like this comes up.
Hopefully, it goes without saying that you need to have current backups of all the partitions you want to move or resize before you let lose with any partition manager.
Loading ...
A nice suite of tools incorporating GParted at its core, is PartedMagic. It can be found at: http://partedmagic.com/wiki/PartedMagic.php?n=PartedMagic.Downloads
During the initial install of Hardy over XP on my Vaio, I was not asked if I wanted to import all my files. The forums showed others who’d had the same issue. In any case, 8.04 repartitioned the entire drive…with all my WinXP files and my Outlook .pst file archived back to 2002.
I need a way to ‘unbutton’ the partition, poke around inside the XP-side, grap a few files and that .pst file and then button it up…until the next time I need something.
Any suggestions?
Since when is partimage no longer part of gparted live ?
Good hints. But: Resizing the root partition with gparted produced damage (at least with my installation)! Resizing the home partition worked without any problems.
I was amazed how GParted works better than commercial products like Partition Magic. One would think that a product you paid for would not fail with incomplete task errors and corrupting your partitions.
@Rambo
Thanks for the link, I wasn’t aware of that suite!
@RobN
As long as the partition table hasn’t been damaged, you should still see the XP partition displayed (likely as NTFS, but maybe FAT32) along with the unix device name. As long as your linux kernel has the right file system modules available, you can temporarily mount the partition and copy out the files you need. Say, gparted says your windows partition is at /dev/hda1, then run:
$ mkdir /tmp/xp
$ sudo mount -t ntfs /dev/hda1 /tmp/xp
@Bolle
http://gparted-forum.surf4.info/viewtopic.php?id=38
@MMM
Hopefully, you were able to restore the root partition from the backup you made just before you let fly with GParted? I can’t stress enough how important the backup step is!
Testdisc may be able to straighten out damage caused by Gparted,it saved me when I created a load of slices across three operating systems.
Find it on System rescue CD and UBCD … Google
Is Qparted and Gparted the same program but different libraries???
You know what would make Qparted/Gparted the perfect rescue disk, add MBR repair, Grub Update/Refresh/Repair.
One thing that is the greatest use for the gparted live cd, is restoring GRUB!!!
Great article, keep it up. I found you guys via the new website indexing service over at http://www.dignova.com
Grtz,
Michael