Play With Your Hard Disk Partitions

Let’s face it—hard disk-related activities can never be simple, especially when that disk has data on it. In this article, we’ll take a look at some of the tools that can make these activities easier.
A partitioning tool

There have been many operating systems and live CDs that provide partitioning utilities. Often, they turn out to be either proprietary or not able to support all filesystems used for Linux, Solaris, etc. But GParted is one such important partitioning utility that supports many filesystems and comes with a friendly user interface.

GParted itself comes on a separate live CD; boot it and double click on the GParted icon from the UI presented. It is also a part of a live CD called System Rescue CD. To run GParted from here, first start X by issuing the startx command, and then open the GParted application from the X terminal. It can also be run from a bootable USB drive or via a PXE boot.

Once GParted is run, you can use it for the following operations:
To create a new partition table (by erasing the old one, if one exists). Use this option very carefully. Unlike other operations, Undo is not supported for this.
A new partition can be created from unallocated/free space. Decide on new partitions as primary, extended or logical, as required.
To delete an existing partition.

The following filesystems are supported by GParted presently: btrfs, crypt-luks, ext2, ext3, ext4, fat16, fat32, hfs, hfs+,jfs, lvm2 pv, ntfs, reiser4, reiserfs, swap, ufs and xfs. Check GParted.sourceforge.net/features.php for individual support of each filesystem and for updates.


To resize/move existing partitions . Sizes can be increased only when free space is available on any adjacent side.
To change flags/labels of a partition.
To format a partition to any supported filesystem—ext3, reiserfs, etc.
To check filesystems for errors.
To view partition information.