GParted 1.6.0-10 / 1.6.0-12 Testing

Overview

GParted is a free partition editor, used for creating, deleting, resizing, moving, checking and copying partitions, and the file systems on them. It is a front-end GUI to the well known GNU Parted partition editor. Though it keeps the power of the one it represents, it has a nice and intuitive interface.

Installation

As we are all used to Linux boxes, you can install GParted from your local distribution package manager, or from Software Center in Ubuntu, Mint, and any other distro that has one. It is nearly supported by all Linux distributions, and no matter where you go you can have the same tool for the job. Unfortunately, it is not supported by Windows or Mac OS.

Interface

As I said, it has a nice, but robust interface, with all functions you need to edit a partition or a hard-disk, and also intuitive commands making it easy to use even for non-geeks.

Pros

From the first use, you can not notice the power that stays behind GParted. Beyond the fact that it uses libparted to detect and manipulate devices and partition tables, it also includes several(optional) file system tools to provide support for the file systems not included in libparted.

Use it for creating space for new operating systems, resizing, moving, deleting, creating or even rescue data you lost accidentally.

File system support is pretty impressive, fully or almost fully supporting ext2, ext3, ext4, FAT16, FAT32, Btrfs, JFS, NTFS, ReiserFS and XFS, and just partial support for exFAT, HFS, HFS+,LVM2 PV, Reiser4, and UFS.

Moreover the GParted project provides a liveCD (or live operating system) based on Debian GNU/Linux including GPparted, and almost all Linux liveCD have GParted included out of the box.

Some unnoticed but useful functions are the 'Manage Flags' and 'Information' options you have. 'Manage Flags' helps a lot when you do not know why your system won't boot into your favorite Operating System, after you installed another OS, why you can't see a partition, because it was hidden, or even repairing a raid partition, as 'Information' option gives you the info just needed for a selected partition.

In short, this partition editor is all you need for a fast, but high quality work you need for all your storage devices. But be careful not to ruin your MP3 Player, or any other device that might be detected by GParted.

Cons

Main cons are of course, the lack of fully support on HFS, HFS+ and exFAT file systems, not making it the swiss knife in any situation you would need a partition editor, but I hope that things will change in time.

Alternatives

The main alternatives for GParted is KDE Partition Manager, QTParted and Pyparted which basically do the same thing, but have a different interface, and slightly different options.

Conclusion

At the and of the day, GParted is a winner for the open-source community, saving the day for everybody, form users, to system admins. There are strong alternatives for the desktop, but the liveCD is an allwinner when it comes to a job done before OS installation.