Searching High and Low

Having paid many dollars over the years for software tools like Norton’s PartitionMagic that were rarely used, I was glad to find GParted. This free partition tool is an open source software project that let’s users add, remove, and edit partitions on hard drives. You can use it for simple projects like creating two drive partitions on a hard drive or for more complex projects like setting up a machine that can dual boot Windows and Linux.

I used it recently to setup a new machine and it worked quickly and flawlessly. It was easy. I downloaded the LiveCD image, burned it to a CD, booted the machine from the disc and then ran the program to configure my partitions. After a restart, the hard disc was setup with the desired partitions and I could then install Windows. While this is a great tool for the computer toolbox, you’ll need to know about various types of filesystems (fat23, ntfs, ext2, etc.) and which ones your operating systems support in order to make full use of GParted.