Every so often there comes a distribution that sets itself apart from all others in ways far beyond mention.  Parted Magic is one of those.  It is *the* defacto distribution for all hard drive maintenance.  And the more it grows, the better it gets.  So let's look at this distro and see what it has to offer.

Overview

Earlier this year we looked at Parted Magic 4.0. and really found it to be a superior and superb distribution for disk management.  In fact, it does its job so well that it almost goes beyond the boundaries of the distro and becomes its own self booting disk management utility.

But version 4.5 is only half a version number, a handful of point versions, beyond its predecessor, so what's so special about it that make it better?  Surprisingly, a lot.  You wouldn't expect this much goodness in a point version release.  This is more the kind of stuff you'd see in a full version release.

And what are those?  Well, the initial boot menu tells us volumes (no pun intended).  Initial boot of the cd renders you a list of 13 available options, one more than the previous version.  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
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.)
13. Super Grub Disk

The one that intrigued me the most was the Super Grub Disk.  The other 12 are standard fare for Parted Magic, and well known by now, but the new item #13 is intriguing.  So I did a little digging to find out what Super Grub Disk is, and stumbled onto this website for the project.

Apparently Super Grub Disk is a new utility that both teaches, and helps users to make dangerous changes to their MBR safe and easy.  And I don't know exactly about it being "safe" or "easy", as the initial menus had me generally confused, but if the claims on SGD's website holds even partially true, then this new tool is a godsend for anyone need to make or repair a boot sector on their computer.

Moving right along and booting into the desktop for Parted Magic, I was greeted by a much more involved desktop than the previous version.  Conky of course was there taking up a section of the desktop (why is that even included?  I see no valid use for something like that on a utility disk like this!), but so was a few other additions.

Gone is the Xterm from the desktop (it's now in the quick launch bar only), and in its place is Clonezilla and a new tool called "Hardware Information" that gives you a fairly nice breakdown of all your system hardware, how it's doing in some cases, and even allows you to export the data as a report to any location you wish, including a USB drive.

And speaking of USB drives, the new Parted Magic has full support for installing the distro to a pen drive and even doing boot and disk maintenance on a USB hard drive (pen drives included).  The list of applications available to you is also greatly improved and expanded.  In fact, the list is expanded in ways that somewhat surprised me.

For example, there's a calendar, a calculator, Leafpad, Midnight Commander, Xarchiver, Xfburn, Firefox (yeah, that was a shock to me too), LFTP, VNCviewer, Xchat, gFTP, and a wide variety of system tools, including ISO Master, PCMan File Manager, TrueCrypt (another surprise) and much more.  It's like Parted Magic suddenly became the swiss army knife of utility distros.

Now many of these applications were in the previous version of Parted Magic, but this is the first real time I've actually seen them.  I say that because in the last review I only focused on the core feature of Parted Magic, that being its disk partitioning and management features.  But if you go exploring, there's just so much here that it's mindblowing.  I think it took the addition of Clonezilla to the desktop before I really decided to dig down deeper into the menus and see what was there.

The fact that Firefox and Xchat are here too are rather humorous.  You can surf Youtube and rant about your favorite topics on IRC all while partitioning or doing maintenance on your drive.  Now how's that for wild?    And for those who are curious of everything that Parted Magic has, here's a complete list courtesy of Parted Magic.

Parted Magic uses Gparted 0.4.6, and while it's not quite as mature as QTparted, it does a very, very good job at handling disk partitioning.  The desktop itself is handled by the very light weight OpenBox window manager.  

Performance of the distro operating entirely from ram on a system with 512mb of memory is very good.  Overall idle CPU usage is about 2% and ram usage is about 8%, or about 45mb, which includes all of your system files and everything.  That's pretty good in my humble opinion, given that the actual disk iso itself is 80mb.

Tests on disk partitioning went smoothly with no flaws, and were completed at a pretty reasonable rate of speed.  Also, the addition of CloneZilla in the disk really adds to the "one stop shop" feature set of this distro.  You no longer need to have 2-3 different disks for disk management and copying in your pocket or in storage.  You just need one.  It really adds to the value of this distro.

The interesting part is, according to the software list, last updated in March of 2009 (our last review was in April), CloneZilla has been there all this time.  To have only just now discovered it means that I have been missing so much of the goodness that's still hidden away in Parted Magic, goodness that I'm just now starting to unlock.  As I did deeper, I'm actually interested to see how much more I can unlock.  But even so, finding these now really makes me excited.

Conclusion

Without getting all mushy or anything, I really think that Parted Magic 4.5 is a huge two thumbs up great!  It's quickly becoming the disk management utility distribution you can't live without!  So if you ever need to do maintenance on your disks, go grab a copy, because it's extremely useful.