Have you ever needed to shrink or split a Windows Partition. If so, you'll find that there is no magical tool included with windows. Nor is there any free / open source tool that I am aware of in the Windows world. Now I'm not bashing Windows here. I spend most of my time in the Windows world. I'm just saying that I've never come across a tool for this purpose.
Those of you that spend your time in the Linux universe however probably have long know about one of my new favorite tools. It is, are you ready for this? GParted, the Gnome Partition Editor application. Specifically GParted LiveCD. The GParted website describes the program as an "...industrial-strength package for creating, destroying, resizing, checking and copying partitions, and the file systems on them. This is useful for creating space for new operating systems, reorganizing disk usage, copying data residing on hard disks and mirroring one partition with another (disk imaging)."
After downloading and burning the tiny 30 Mb ISO I rebooted my Windows XP box knowing not what to expect. After selecting my graphics chipset and desired color depth I was greeted by the GParted program. I was able to resize my existing NTFS partition. Create new partitions and even format them in NTFS. Within minutes Windows XP was back up, with the new partitions working flawlessly.
GParted doesn't just deal with NTFS. It also supports the following file types: ext2, ext3, fat16, fat32, hfs, hfs+, JFS, linux-swap, reiserfs, reiser4, UFS and XFS. Each with some exceptions depending upon the particular file system you use. If you've ever needed a Partition Magic type program, but like me have been to cheap to buy it, please do yourself a favor and check out GParted. You can find it here. For the cost of a 30 meg download and a CDR this is a tool no computer geek should be without!
About Me
- RenegadeTech
- I'm a transplanted farm boy now minding the server farm and coming up with interesting methods to entertain myself. I have a lovely wife and three children under 5 so life at our house is a bit insane.
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6 comments:
Cool, but unfortunately it doesnt allow moving of NTFS partitions, or else it would put partition magic out of business.
yea, Gparted is simply based on the linux program Parted. Parted is based on the idea of partition magic. Gnome didn't make this App. B/c most program s for linux are open-source they can be implemented in several ways that windows programs cannot. Because parted is open source Gnome can make it a partof the OS where as windows cannot do that with programs b/c of licenceing issues.
Make sure this gparted uses the official (and recent) reiserfs libraries and not some stale out of date unofficial ones which will trash all your reiserfs data.
Too many gparted use the old bogus one which will hose your data.
I had my fault confirmed after paying $25 to the kindly reiserfs folk who researched my problen until they could point out that the bug was not theirs.
Oh man this will save so much time ! Thanks
Thanks, this looks great.
You can also use SystemRescueCD which has GParted, QTParted, and much more. That CD is amazing.
http://www.sysresccd.org/Main_Page
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