Gparted-Live
GParted-live is a live Linux environment providing users with a minimal graphical interface for GParted. It is available for download in several formats including both .iso and .zip for users to make a bootable CD or run directly from one's Grub menu respectively.
Contents
Obtaining GParted-Live
Several formats are available as mentioned above. See the Official GParted webpage for more.
Running GParted-Live
Bootable CD
Simply download the .iso formated gparted image from the link above and burn it to CD using your favorite image writer. If you are totally new to Linux, you can burn an iso directly to CD from the shell. See the Burning with cdrecord wiki article for instructions.
Bootable USB Drive
Putting GParted live on a USB stick is trivial if you have the right tool. In this case, you want unetbootin which is a very powerful GUI-based utility that will allow you to put the GParted-live.iso onto a USB stick and boot from it.
- Insert your USB stick you want to use and make sure its partitioned
- Start UNetbootin as root user
- Select "Diskimage/ISO" from the GUI
- Point it to your gparted-live.x.xx.x-x.iso
- Select the correct partition on your USB stick
- Hit OK to start and wait to umount then remove the USB stick (unetbootin will tell you when it is finished)
From HDD via GRUB
Assuming you are using GRUB as your boot loader, the following will show you how to boot directly into the GParted-Live environment from GRUB's menu. The result is the same environment as the Live CD gives, but with much faster boot times.
Download the GParted-Live files
Download the appropriate ISO file [GParted-Live iso] and save it to a folder of your choosing.
Modify your GRUB config files
Add the following to /etc/grub.d/40_custom, replacing the path to the iso file (/gparted/gparted-live-0.18.0-1-amd64.iso in the example below) with the path to the GParted iso you downloaded earlier and replacing the device name of the hard disk and partition containing the ISO file ("(hd0,3)" in the example : following Grub's way of naming the devices)
menuentry "GParted Live" { set isofile="/gparted/gparted-live-0.18.0-1-amd64.iso" loopback loop (hd0,3)$isofile linux (loop)/live/vmlinuz boot=live config union=aufs noswap noprompt vga=788 ip=frommedia toram=filesystem.squashfs findiso=$isofile initrd (loop)/live/initrd.img }
If GParted fails to boot with the following message "xinit: giving up", this link may help: http://gparted.org/display-doc.php?name=gparted-live-manual#gparted-live-list-of-booting-tips
For example, owners of ATI video cards may benefit from applying the radeon.modeset=0 kernel parameter to their GRUB entry.
Re-generate grub.cfg
Re-generate your grub.cfg file with
sudo grub-mkconfig -o /boot/grub/grub.cfg
Reboot
Upon rebooting, you should see an entry in GRUB called "GParted Live".