Monday, November 05, 2007

Free Disk Partitioning Utility - GParted

I was looking for an open source alternative to Norton's Partition Magic. I created 2 partitions on my laptop's 40 GB hard drive and my 20 GB C: partition was running out of space. I wanted to extend it's size. Windows Disk Management utility does not give you the ability to do this. I wanted a reliable tool that would let you do this. I used Partition Magic in the past. I wanted to explore open source options before buying something to do this and found a few. The best among them, IMHO, is GParted.
Here is the description of GParted from the website -> GParted is an industrial-strength package for creating, destroying, resizing, moving, checking and copying partitions, and the filesystems 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).
In order to use GParted on a windows PC, you need to create a Live CD [a bootable Linux CD]. The disk image for the GParted Live CD is available here. You need to download the .iso image to a CD and this creates the bootable disk. Documentation on how to use GParted Live CD is available here.

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