SUSE & openSUSE

GParted, GNOME Partition editor is a free opensource Partition Editor for Linux and can be used as a Live CD to boot a system and edit the Hard Disk partitions. 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).

I have to say, GParted is one of the best tools to manipulate your Hard disk partitions and is extremely useful. Live CD for GParted means, you can boot your PC and manipulate your disk without having to boot into the system. GParted GUI is simple and easy to understand and use. However, these are advanced operations and care has to be taken and make sure you know what you are doing else risk losing your data on it.

Install GParted

Click this  supported on openSUSE 11.1/11.0/10.3/10.2 from packman to install GParted. This should download the YMP file and automatically launch the YaST package manager to add the required Repositories and download and install GParted and the required dependencies. Click next on the GParted installation screen and Next again on the installation proposal window. This should start adding the required repositories, download and install GParted and its required dependencies. Click Finish when the installation completes successfully.

NOTE: Click here for a how to on enabling 1-click install in openSUSE 10.2

This should install GParted under “Applications – System – More Programs”. Click GParted to start the GNome Partition Editor. GParted will analyse the disks and provide the list of partitions and the file systems on them and the free disk space that can be used.

GParted cannot work on mounted file systems and hence needs the partition that you need to be resized or deleted have the file system mounted on it unmounted.

You can create a new parition table but bear in mind this will destroy the data on the entire disk.

From the View – Filesystem Support menu, you can find the level of support on the Filesystems. For instance, it fully supports Create,Grow,Shrink, Move,copy, check, Label on an EXT2 or EXt3 file system while gparted can only move or copy the UFS file system.

You can check and repair the file system on a selected partition or resize a choosen partition. Resize can take a considerable amount of time depending on the size of the Disk and the size of the partition and free space on the disk. And sometime, you are talking hours togethor. I’ve been there many times so much so that I’ll start resizing just before going to bed so it is done by the time I’m back on my feet the next day morning.

Click here to visit the project homepage and here to download the LiveCD ISO if you choose to boot with your CD and manipulate the partitions.