The storage capacity of today's harddisk is normally huge, and we usually subdivided it into one or more storage partitions.
GPartEd (Gnome Partition Editor) is an industrial-strength open source application for manipulating the harddisk partitions, which includes creating, destroying, resizing, moving, checking and copying them and the filesystems on them.
When and why we need to use GPartEd?
- When we plan to install another operating system in the computer for dual-booting, and need to allocate free partition space for the new operating system.
- When one of the partition space is almost fully utilized, while other still have plenty of space, and we need to reorganize the disk usage by repartitioning.
- When we want to copy data residing on harddisks and mirroring one partition with another (disk imaging).
- When we want to remove a Linux partition in a dual-boot computer, and make that partition available to Windows. Note that the Windows Disk Management Tool doesn't recognise Linux partition, so you need to use 3rd party tools like GPartEd for this purpose.
Please be aware that if any problem occurs to the harddisk partition tables, data might be lost and difficult to recover (and sometimes non-recoverable). Honestly, if you don't understand what I'm talking about in this post, and you are unsure what a "partition" is actually mean, then this tools is not for you to play around with.
It is prudent and advisable to always make a backup of your harddisk with
Clonezilla that I've introduced earlier before you make any changes to the partitions.
GPartEd is available in
LiveCD format (boot from CDROM) and also
LiveUSB format (boot from USB thumb drive). It can also be run from network on
PXE server. You do not need to install anything into your harddisk in order to use it.
Click here to look for documentations of GPartEd.
