Hard Drive Partitioning with GParted

Partitions?

For those who are uninitiated in partitions, here’s the quick and easy low down.

If you have just one hard drive and you wish you had two, you can divide and conquer.  Of course this does not give you double the storage space, it just gives you two logical drives on one physical drive.   Now it’s possible to divide it up even smaller, and smaller.  This is accomplished by partitioning your hard drive.  There are different type of software for this, but what my friend Sean pointed out to me is definitely worth having.

In the past, it was not something you would want to do when you have data you don’t want to lose, especially your operating system (unless you plan on reinstalling anyway).  Microsoft used to, and possibly still does, include fdisk which could partition your drive.  However, doing so was the equivalent to formatting it first.  It’s not something you wanted to do as an afterthought.

When you install Ubuntu (or Kubuntu, Edubuntu, etc.) it will ask if you want to erase your hard drive and start fresh with it being your sole operating system, or if you would like to dual boot (that is having the choice of booting up into Ubuntu or Windows).  If you chose the dual boot option, then it will want to setup a partition, setting aside a portion of the hard drive for Windows and a portion for Ubuntu.  You get to decide the size of the partitions.  It works very well.  I have never lost my Windows operating system once even after a dozen separate installs.  Pretty slick.

A lot of people like to do this the first time they install Ubuntu, so they can keep Windows installed if it turns out they don’t like Ubuntu.   Sometimes too, they may have certain programs that are necessary and work ONLY in Windows.  I use this last option.

Partition Messup

Now one day I was installing Ubuntu for a dual boot setup, however grub kept giving me a hassle.  So I would try to re-install.  I did this a few times.  Then I noticed that my hard drive was shrinking.  Every time that I went to re-install, I was losing an unrecoverable partition from the previous attempt.  Why exactly, I don’t know.

The fix came in the form of GParted.  I downloaded the iso file and burned that to a CD-ROM and then rebooted off the CD.  Up came a graphical interface and I was able to see the partitions of each of my 3 drives.  I was able to delete partitions, make new partitions, or combine partitions.  I was also given a choice of filesystem format from Fat32, NTFS, ext3 and many others.

GParted screen

Problem solved.

This is a disk I will keep in my arsenal for sure.  What’s nice is that it’s a live-cd so if someone needs help with their PC, there’s no need to install any software, download anything, just slap this puppy in the drive and boot.