Comments on: 074 – Fry Your Pickles. Back Up Your Data. http://blogs.wels.net/welstech/2009/06/03/074-fry-your-pickles-back-up-your-data/ WELSTech Wed, 11 Nov 2009 16:46:30 -0600 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.8.4 hourly 1 By: Jeremy Johnson http://blogs.wels.net/welstech/2009/06/03/074-fry-your-pickles-back-up-your-data/comment-page-1/#comment-33 Jeremy Johnson Thu, 04 Jun 2009 18:55:16 +0000 http://welstech.wels.net/wpmu/2009/06/03/074-fry-your-pickles-back-up-your-data/#comment-33 Hi Martin and Sallie, Your discussion of storage and backups got me thinking about a wonderful piece of open source software called GParted. GParted is a graphical frontend for GNU Parted, and it has many uses. As a partition editor, it allows you to create, format, resize, copy, move, check, repair, and label partitions on your disks. It is fully compatible with NTFS, FAT16, FAT32, ext3, ext4, and other file systems. It is installed by default on many Linux Live CDs, including Ubuntu. This makes disk editing easy because the program runs off the CD instead of the hard drive. The GUI is easy to understand. It doesn't perform any actions until you specifically tell it to, instead making a list of all the things you want to do before it actually begins. I have two examples of GParted's many uses that I would like to share. I recently used GParted upgrade my wife's hard drive without having to reinstall anything. I popped in the new hard drive with the old one, booted off the Ubuntu CD, and copied the two partitions from the old hard drive to the new one. During the copy, I also had the partitions resized to fill the entire drive. One was NTFS and the other was FAT32. When it was done, I removed the old hard drive and booted from the new disk. My wife's computer was the same as before, except she now had much more storage space. Therefore, it seems GParted is great for ghosting. In the other instance, I was reformatting someone's computer and reinstalling Windows. When I tried using the Windows XP install disk to format the hard drive to NTFS, it locked up. I popped in the Ubuntu CD and instead used GParted to format to NTFS. After that, I installed Windows from the Windows disk and everything worked fine. If I didn't have GParted available to me, they may have ended up with a dead machine. (After seeing this, the owner of the computer had many questions about Ubuntu.) Basically, if you ever do any dabbling with partitioning and storage, there's a good chance you can find a use for GParted. Always keep a Linux Live CD handy. Jeremy Hi Martin and Sallie,

Your discussion of storage and backups got me thinking about a wonderful piece of open source software called GParted. GParted is a graphical frontend for GNU Parted, and it has many uses. As a partition editor, it allows you to create, format, resize, copy, move, check, repair, and label partitions on your disks. It is fully compatible with NTFS, FAT16, FAT32, ext3, ext4, and other file systems. It is installed by default on many Linux Live CDs, including Ubuntu. This makes disk editing easy because the program runs off the CD instead of the hard drive. The GUI is easy to understand. It doesn’t perform any actions until you specifically tell it to, instead making a list of all the things you want to do before it actually begins. I have two examples of GParted’s many uses that I would like to share.

I recently used GParted upgrade my wife’s hard drive without having to reinstall anything. I popped in the new hard drive with the old one, booted off the Ubuntu CD, and copied the two partitions from the old hard drive to the new one. During the copy, I also had the partitions resized to fill the entire drive. One was NTFS and the other was FAT32. When it was done, I removed the old hard drive and booted from the new disk. My wife’s computer was the same as before, except she now had much more storage space. Therefore, it seems GParted is great for ghosting.

In the other instance, I was reformatting someone’s computer and reinstalling Windows. When I tried using the Windows XP install disk to format the hard drive to NTFS, it locked up. I popped in the Ubuntu CD and instead used GParted to format to NTFS. After that, I installed Windows from the Windows disk and everything worked fine. If I didn’t have GParted available to me, they may have ended up with a dead machine. (After seeing this, the owner of the computer had many questions about Ubuntu.)

Basically, if you ever do any dabbling with partitioning and storage, there’s a good chance you can find a use for GParted. Always keep a Linux Live CD handy.

Jeremy

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