GNU Parted
From Free net encyclopedia
GNU Parted is a program for creating, destroying, resizing, checking and copying partitions, and the file systems on them. This is useful for creating space for new operating systems, reorganising hard disk usage, copying data between hard disks and disk imaging.
GNU Parted's web page is at http://www.gnu.org/software/parted/parted.html and may be downloaded from http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/parted/ or one of the mirrors.
Currently, Parted only runs under GNU/Linux and GNU/Hurd. A boot disk image is available on all mirrors in the /gnu/parted/bootdisk directory for those who have neither of these systems.
Graphical versions
GParted and QtParted are graphical programs using the parted libraries. They are adapted for GTK+ and Qt, respectively, two major toolkits used for Graphical Linux and Hurd installations. They are often included as utilities on many livecd distributions to make partitioning easier.
One such linux distribution that comes with this application is Knoppix.
Limitations
Unfortunately, parted has some limitations. One of them is that it cannot resize NTFS partitions without external tools, such as the "ntfs-tools" package. Unlike some other partition managers, it is unable to fix errors on the hard drive before repartitioning it. That means that one has to use a combination of a program to repair hard disk errors before parted if one wants to repartition a damaged hard disk.