Gparted Live CD

[acal3000]

No I that I turned on mr spam

but since is the open source section this mught be useful

http://gparted.sourceforge.net/download.php

Its good when you plan fromat or move partitions like partition magicdoes

But some complain open source software is less automated or less easy to use

But this turned more on the easy side and boot is more automated to than the previous version I used to use

I like coz I don't like pay the $$$$ for Software like Partition Magic and do the same or even better for my taste anywyas

I liked now that the external hds are becoming more popura they added support to format thems too from boot

Could old Partitimgic 8.0 from Ontrack before Symantec bought do that?. I doubt it was even even provs supporting EXT3 filesystems and my old bootmagic supporting newer distros was giving headaches

I don't use it anymore

Apart from Fedora 5 that Partition Magic i had was unuseful and Fedora with Ext2 uuuuuugusss I gues like FAt32 and then NTFS very uunrealy whne pc was bad turned off the pc a power shortage

Now is Ext4 filesystem stills not seems poplar enough with all progs I guess change one of partition I don't use much to try it

[JN4OldSchool]

The gparted CD is a MUST in every Linux users toolbox! Most distros also include it, but you will have problems trying to repartition an active partition! If it is a live distro you can use it just like the gparted live CD. I had an old MEPIS live CD (just broke the disk a few weeks ago :( ) that I used to use because it contained gparted and would also mount all partitions on the system and put nice icons on the desktop. You would log in live as root and you had instant access to any OS on the computer and could read/write to any partitions. With Gparted you could shrink, relabel, create etc...The Knoppix live CDs are also great for this.

One word of warning, Gparted, though advertised, does NOT deal with LVM at this point! This means that you will still need to use the LVM tools to expand/shrink these partitions.

My advice is to use gparted to shrink partitions and take back some free space. You now need around 15-20GB for a working Linux install, anything less WILL lead to problems! Once you have the free space then use the distro's installer to format to ext3, ext4 or whatever. Be careful on Fedora as the default is LVM! I hate LVM for this reason, It has its uses and is actually very useful in some cases, but for a home desktop, especially a laptop with a single drive, it is stupid! ALWAYS do a manual partition!

One last piece of advice. ALWAYS back up the drive before repartitioning it!!! I can not tell you how many sob stories we see every week with people wanting to try Linux who shrink their Win partitions, install Linux then cant find the Windows install! Then they freak, it is their term paper for their PHD, their wife's yearly report, their pr0n collection...whatever...Most times Grub just needs to be remapped, but I never get over the stupidity of screwing with repartitioning a hard drive when you made no backup!

[acal3000]

The gparted CD is a MUST in every Linux users toolbox! Most distros also include it, but you will have problems trying to repartition an active partition! If it is a live distro you can use it just like the gparted live CD. I had an old MEPIS live CD (just broke the disk a few weeks ago :( ) that I used to use because it contained gparted and would also mount all partitions on the system and put nice icons on the desktop. You would log in live as root and you had instant access to any OS on the computer and could read/write to any partitions. With Gparted you could shrink, relabel, create etc...The Knoppix live CDs are also great for this.

One word of warning, Gparted, though advertised, does NOT deal with LVM at this point! This means that you will still need to use the LVM tools to expand/shrink these partitions.

My advice is to use gparted to shrink partitions and take back some free space. You now need around 15-20GB for a working Linux install, anything less WILL lead to problems! Once you have the free space then use the distro's installer to format to ext3, ext4 or whatever. Be careful on Fedora as the default is LVM! I hate LVM for this reason, It has its uses and is actually very useful in some cases, but for a home desktop, especially a laptop with a single drive, it is stupid! ALWAYS do a manual partition!

One last piece of advice. ALWAYS back up the drive before repartitioning it!!! I can not tell you how many sob stories we see every week with people wanting to try Linux who shrink their Win partitions, install Linux then cant find the Windows install! Then they freak, it is their term paper for their PHD, their wife's yearly report, their pr0n collection...whatever...Most times Grub just needs to be remapped, but I never get over the stupidity of screwing with repartitioning a hard drive when you made no backup!

Have to agree on LVM part I had porb with one partion coz that Logical Partition are more prpb to be bootable I had that prob one time

Until now rezing haven't been that porblematic fome since all is made on free space with no data the most that genrallyn happens of free space dont shrink or reexling become unpartionated but if the hd is gone bad maybe there could be a prob

Some other probs I had sometmes wthen mount point change Mandriva doesn't boot and have to edit the fstab file from a Live CD or my other dual booted pclos partition

Have to admit myself sometimes I haven't backup whne shirnk rezing prtions coz lazyness sometimes but one could util point you take risk or not

Changing the fileysystem formating the /home partition well that is another thing tthose could make data loss of course


But wel whne the get deleted is not like old days if the drive have not too much time since the format and too much overwriting of disk near 100% data can be recovered. I recnetly got some startp disk that helps for that. Support even Linux partitions where other notcan't recall the name right now

And several distros repos I guess there is one called testdisk it gives the impresion does something smilar to recover lost partitions on the terminal but I am not sure

I sometimes hav used live cd from distros but I don't why some tend to freeze whne rexing moving partition and this live cd help here even gparted bundled on some distos have give that prob while gparted live cd only not I don't why