Partitioning Your Windows Hard Drive - Parted Magic
What partitioning looks like
Looking for a tool to partition your Windows hard drive? That’s something that pops up when you’re installing a GNU/Linux distro on your computer—like Peppermint ICE—and it’s handy to be able to resize your Windows hard drive, shrinking it down to make space for a GNU/Linux distro. Usually, 10-20gigs is enough for a GNU/Linux distro if you aren’t saving too much data on it. I partitioned a 440gig hard drive and gave Peppermint ICE 50 gigs…much more space than it needs but I intend to add some software to it, but even then, the installed ICE won’t get much bigger than a few gigs.
In the old days, you had to buy a special program (Partition Magic, although it’s no longer available) to get the job done, but these days, there are ample tools and they come in a variety of flavors. From Wikipedia:
Disk partitioning is the act of dividing a hard disk drive into multiple logical storage units referred to as partitions, to treat one physical disk drive as if it were multiple disks. Partitions are also termed “slices” for operating systems based on BSD, Solaris or GNU Hurd. A partition editor software program can be used to create, resize, delete, and manipulate these partitions on the hard disk.
Thanks to The Tightwad Tech podcast forum, I found myself exploring the Parted Magic web site. I typically use Gparted ISO on a bootable USB flash drive, but after reading about Parted Magic, I’m inclined to use it instead!
The Parted Magic OS employs core programs of GParted and Parted to handle partitioning tasks with ease, while featuring other useful software (e.g. Partimage, TestDisk, Truecrypt, Clonezilla, G4L, SuperGrubDisk, ddrescue, etc…) and an excellent set of info to benefit the user. An extensive collection of file system tools are also included, as Parted Magic supports the following: btrfs, ext2, ext3, ext4, fat16, fat32, hfs, hfs+, jfs, linux-swap, ntfs, reiserfs, reiser4, and xfs.
One of the neat things about the Parted Magic web site is that they include videos like the following:
- Resizing Windows Partition And Making A New Drive - Sub Q
- How to create a partition for your osx86 with Parted Magic (Shrink your current os)
- Parted Magic 2 demo
On a side note, I couldn’t help but notice that the Parted Magic web site is using Dokuwiki, a free, open source wiki.
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Everything posted on Miguel Guhlin’s blogs/wikis are his personal opinion and do not necessarily represent the views of his employer(s) or its clients. Read Full Disclosure