GNU Parted

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GNU Parted

Developer:	Various
Latest release:	1.8.1 / Dec 12, 2006
OS:	Linux
Use:	Disk partitioning
License:	GPL
Website:	gnu.org/software/parted/

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. It was written by Andrew Clausen and Lennert Buytenhek.

It consists of a library, libparted, and a command-line frontend, parted, that also serves as reference implementation.

Currently, Parted runs only under GNU/Linux, GNU Hurd and BeOS.

1 Graphical versions
2 Limitations
3 See also
4 External links

[edit] 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 live CD distributions to make partitioning easier.

Some Linux distributions that come with this application are Knoppix and SystemRescueCd.

[edit] Limitations

Unfortunately, Parted has some limitations. One of them is that it cannot resize NTFS partitions without external tools, such as the ntfsprogs package. 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. To overcome this limitation, many rescue discs include all the required utilities in one bootable CD, enabling resizing of most filesystems.

Other current limitations are that it cannot handle the extended attributes of the ext2fs, for instance, those related to SElinux. This extended attributes should have to be removed to resize partitions with parted.