Regardless of the operating system you want to install on your computer, there is something that every OS has in common and those are partitions.
There are several advantages to having multiple partitions on the HDD, such as separating the operating system from user files, creating a swap partition, run and store multiple operating systems on each partition.
Gparted is the GNOME partition editor for creating, reorganizing and deleting partitions.
With gparted you can do the following tasks:
1. Create a partition table on a hard disk.
2. Enable and disable partition indicators such as “boot” and “hidden”
3. Perform partition actions such as creating, deleting, resizing, moving, checking, labeling, copying, and pasting.
The gparted application is designed to allow you to edit the partitions and reduce the risk of data loss at the same time. Gparted is a free program that allows you to create, delete and modify partitions. Gparted is an easy-to-use application thanks to its minimalist graphical interface and is an independent app regardless of the PC’s operating system.
Whether we are talking about a new hard drive, resizing a partition too large or too small for your needs, copying a partition to another hard drive or changing the file system, all these tasks can be achieved with gparted. At startup, gparted will scan all hard drives installed in the system and display existing partitions, the percentage of occupation with files, or unallocated space, if any. Choosing the HDD you want to modify can easily be done from the gparted program.
Gparted has the ability to cancel operations step-by-step or all at once. The hard drive will not undergo any change until you press the Apply All Operations command. A window will appear indicating all the operations performed and the progress of the current one. The required time for an operation may vary from a few seconds to tens of minutes depending on the load. Typically, operations that reduce partitions that already have files can take the most time to complete, while deleting partitions is usually the fastest operation.
GParted comes preinstalled on some Linux distributions, but can also be found in the repositories of each distribution and can be installed using a package manager.
CHARACTERISTICS
Besides the main features, GParted also offers:
– Checking partitions
– support for error checking
– supports moving and copying unaccepted partition content
– Supports multiple languages
Gparted works with a wide range of storage devices:
– hard drives
– flash memory devices, USB sticks, SSD devices, non-volatile memory devices
INTERFACE
GParted has a menu at the top, and below it has the toolbar. On the desktop, there is a graphical representation of the selected disk, as well as a table containing all the partitions. In the upper right corner, there is a drop-down list of USB disks and drives connected to your computer.
GParted offers a simple interface for resizing partitions. Provides full support for various file systems, including common ones, as well as the less common ones. You can run GParted from the command line.
A description of the indicators in a GPT partition table:
– Atvrecv is used to indicate an Apple TV Recovery partition.
– BIOS_GRUB indicates a bootable BIOS partition, commonly used by GRUB 2
– Boot is used by system loaders from commercial operating systems. The boot indicator indicates that the partition is active or bootable (boots the operating system). Only one partition may be active as boot on a disk drive.
– Diag indicates that the partition is used for diagnostics or recovery.
– ESP indicates an EFI system partition used to boot computers with EFI class 1 or UEFI class 2 or 3.
– Hidden is used by some commercial operating systems. The hidden indicator makes the invisible partition for some operating systems.
– HP service is used to indicate a Hewlett Packard service partition.
– Irst identifies an Intel Rapid Start Technology partition.
– Legacy_boot is used for special purpose software to indicate that the partition might be bootable.
– LVM indicates that the partition is used by a Logical Volume Manager.
– Msftdata identifies partitions that contain Microsoft file systems such as NTFS or FAT.
– Msftres is used to indicate a Microsoft Reserved partition.
– Prep is used to indicate that the boot partition is on Power Performance Computing hardware.
– RAID indicates that the partition is used in the Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks (RAID) – hard disk array configuration.