GNU Parted

GNU Parted

Developer(s)	Various
Stable release	3.0 / May 31, 2011; 5 months ago (2011-05-31)
Operating system	Linux, FreeBSD, BeOS
Type	Partition editor
License	GNU General Public License (version 3 or later)
Website	http://www.gnu.org/software/parted/

GNU Parted (the name being the conjunction of the two words PARTition and EDitor) is a free partition editor, used 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 front-end, parted, that also serves as a reference implementation.

Currently^[update] GNU Parted runs only under Linux and GNU Hurd.^[1]

Other front-ends

GParted uses GNU Parted in the backend

nparted is the newt-based front end to GNU Parted.^[2]

Projects have started for an ncurses front-end,^{[citation needed]} that also could be used in Windows (with GNUWin32 Ncurses).^{[3][citation needed]}

fatresize offers a command-line interface for FAT16/FAT32 non-destructive resize and uses the GNU Parted library.^[4]

Graphical front-ends

GParted and KDE Partition Manager are graphical programs using the parted libraries. They are adapted for GNOME and KDE respectively; two major desktop environments for Unix-like installations. They are often included as utilities on many live CD distributions to make partitioning easier. QtParted was another graphical front-end based on Qt that is no longer being actively maintained.

Pyparted^[5] (also called python-parted)^[6] is the Python front-end for GNU Parted.

Linux distributions that come with this application by default include Slackware, Knoppix, sidux, SystemRescueCD and Parted Magic.

Limitations

Parted has some limitations. For example, 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 file systems.

Parted cannot handle the extended attributes of the ext2 file system, for instance, those related to SElinux. These extended attributes have to be removed to resize partitions with Parted.

See also

Free software portal

• List of disk partitioning software
• fdisk
• cfdisk
• gpart
• gparted
• FIPS
• Master Boot Record manager

References

1. ^ GNU Parted supported platforms
2. ^ Overview of nparted source package
3. ^ Ncurses
4. ^ SourceForge.net: fatresize
5. ^ Fedora People
6. ^ Ubuntu - Details of package python-parted in dapper

External links

• GNU parted page at www.gnu.org
• parted(8) – Linux Administration and Privileged Commands Manual