Raiden's Realm: Review: Parted Magic 3.3

Review: Parted Magic 3.3 (Page 1 of 1)

Written by Steve Lake
Posted on: Dec 17, 2008 at 01:18pm
Section: Reviews
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One of the things I've found that new users tend to have trouble with is disk partitioning. Even some professional computer repairman have issues with it. That's why I was glad the day I stumbled onto Gparted, a free open source disk partition editing program that allows you to make changes to the partitions on your hard drive. But that had its issues, the biggest being that you had to fire up a full blown livecd in order to gain access to it. From a practical standpoint, that really didn't work too well.

That's where Parted Magic is so nice. It's a simple, no nonsense, partition editor and management application designed to provide you with a bootable option for editing, adding and deleting partitions. I've worked with numerous partition management programs before, including Partition Magic, Copy Commander and others. Those don't hold a candle to Parted Magic.

I recently had a system on which I was booting three different OS's. Well, one of them stopped being of use to me for a wide range of reasons, and being no longer required, needed to be removed. So, deciding that I had nothing to loose, I gave Parted Magic a spin. It boots surprisingly quickly, and loads into a very spartan Linux desktop.

But that doesn't mean it's ugly. The developers appear to have taken considerable care to not only make the desktop presentable, but also very easy to use. Even if you've never worked with a single partition editor in your life, or even a major program like Copy Commander, you'll find Parted Magic easy to use, intuitive, and amazingly stable and quick. The graphics included with this distro also give it a nice visual appeal.

Parted Magic is based on Slackware 12.1, and includes a handful of file managers, an imaging program, network capabilities (for mirroring across a network), the latest version of Gparted, and a memory footprint to be envied. The latest version of Parted Magic has also made improvements in the handling of file systems (it supports ext2, ext3, ext4, fat16, fat32, hfs, hfs+, jfs, linux-swap, ntfs, reiserfs, reiser4, and xfs, and has recently added nfs support) and also sports an impressive list of utility programs in it's arsenal, along with improvements to it's USB and MiniPM (a very tiny, minimalistic rendition) versions.

Anyways, when I got to the desktop, I found the link to Gparted, opened it, and immediately got to work shifting and resizing partitions. At first I was afraid that I'd make a mistake. But the more I played with it, the more comfortable I got. Now you should never get *too* comfortable, as you're likely to make mistakes, but at the same time you won't be too nervous, or exceptionally prone to making a mistake due to the ease by which editing partitions can be made.

In the end, I was able to easily remove the unwanted partition, resize the two remaining, and then get happily under way again with no hickups, glitches, or problems.

For such a simple distribution with a simplistic purpose, it's been one of the better distributions I've come across for general maintenance to your computer's hard drive, and it's partitions. I'm quite impressed with it, and would recommend it to anyone who needs to edit some partitions on their computer, change them, remove them, etc.

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