Written by Steve Lake
Posted on: 04.06.2009 at 02:08pm
Section: Reviews
Parted Magic, one of the best stand alone partition editors, is back once again with a new and updated version. But what's so special about this version, considering the narrow scope of things that Parted Magic is designed to do?
Well, the first new feature is full support for Device Mapper RAID partitions. If you don't know what that is, don't panic, because you likely aren't working with anything like that. If you are, this should peak your interest.
The second major new feature comes in the way Parted Magic boots. The developers have tossed out the old initrd system (a temporary ramdisk used by the kernel during startup), and gone with the faster, more powerful initramfs. It may not seem like an important change, but it does help the kernel get it's feet under it faster, which in turn allows the system to complete its boot faster.
Another advantage of the initramfs system is that it's considerably smaller than initrd, and all the drivers needed to boot the cdrom are built directly into the kernel, thus allowing much faster load times and far less overhead to slow things down.
The developers have also made improvements in the “Low RAM” option, allowing Parted Magic to run very comfortably on older machines, even ones with as little as 64 meg of memory. (when was the last time you actually saw a computer that only had 64 meg of memory!?!? That's an OLD machine!)
It does this by using Xvesa (a very light weight windowing system similar to Xorg) and TWM (a very light weight window manager). It also runs with a reasonable screen resolution of 800x600 at 4 bits. Yeah, 4 bits. The last time a system has run that low a color density was back in the early DOS and Unix days before even Windows was around.
Also, it doesn't load anything into memory (including daemons and other tools) that might suck up memory, but rather sticks with a very basic session of Gparted to preserve as much available ram as possible.
Initial boot of the cd renders you a list of 12 available options. They are:
1. Default Settings (ie, the standard “boot from disk, run from ram” setup.
2. Live with Default Settings (run the distro from cd just like a normal live cd)
3. Live with low RAM settings (this is the light weight option mentioned above.)
4. Do not eject CD (for use with certain programs like Virtualbox and the like)
5. Alternate graphical server (normal boot using Xvesa instead of Xorg for the windowing system. This is good to use if Xorg fails to load for some reason)
6. Safe Graphics Settings (somewhat of a failsafe boot option when certain graphics cards cause boot or run problems.)
7. Failsafe Settings (if everything else fails, use this.)
8. Console (boots to shell)
9. Local Boot (boot from HD)
10. Reboot (self explanatory)
11. Memtest86+ (useful for testing your ram when having issues with memory)
12. Hardware Detection Tool (a hardware analyzer tool. Useful for troubleshooting hardware related issues.)
For the vast majority of users, option 1 is fully sufficient. However, the fact that the list of extra available is so long is a nice benefit. It means that Parted Magic is plenty flexible, and can work with nearly any situation you might encounter.
The LiveCD loads pretty quickly (There's only the livecd, no install option is available. Then again, why would you want to, given that this is just a utility cd?) and puts you onto a rather basic desktop. It's not barren or anything, but the developers used a much simpler wallpaper, while adding some rather interesting new tools.
Firstly, the old standbys are still there, including Gparted and RoxTerm, but there's some other extras that weren't around the first time. However, all of the same features mentioned in our review of version 3.3 are still there.
Most of the visible changes I see involve upgrades to existing applications such as Gparted, however, there is a LOT of changes under the hood that you can't directly see to improve performance and flexibility.
Usability overall is very good. In fact, I'm loving the new “mount devices” and “smart control” features. The “mount devices” feature uses the Pcman file manager to give you direct access to any available drives on the system, and even copy files from one location to another. This is useful when rescuing data before repartitioning a drive, or restoring it afterwards.
It works in concert with Mount-GTK to handle mounting and unmounting of drives, making it as simple as point and click to mount a drive or edit details about it. The “smart control” feature offers you the ability to take advantage of the Smart Hard Drive Control system available with some board and hard drives.
This is a tool used to monitor and check the health of a hard drive to warn of impending failure in time to allow you to get your data off before it dies. The tool behind “smart control” is an application called “GSmartControl” that actually allows you to check on the smart status of your drive, and even run tests against it to ensure reliability of the drive.
Another new feature is Conky. It's setup to run on the desktop to allow you to keep a close eye on resources so that you don't accidentally run out of them while doing a sensitive disk operation.
As far as actually using Parted Magic 4.0 to partition a drive, it works great. I went in, threw everything at it I could and it worked flawlessly. In fact, the newer version of Gparted works a lot better than the previous versions used. It was more or less *click, click, click, done* when repartitioning a drive. Yes, it was fast!
And I haven't seen any failings in all the tests I've run, including stability issues. It's been rock solid. So overall I have no complaints with this version of Parted Magic. I think it's some of the best work I've seen from this developer group since it got started. Well done guys!
For more information, don't forget to check out their homepage here: http://partedmagic.com/