Doing rude horrible and wonderful things to your disk partitions!

I will talk about a couple of Opensource tools i like here. One is Clonezilla. a great tool for disk to disk or disk to image cloning.


The other is Gparted, another wonderful tool that will do disk partition alteration and and editing.


This is a collection of information about Clonezilla.


What is Clonezilla:


Clonezilla is an open-source suite of cloning tools developed by Taiwan's National Center for High-Performance Computing (NCHC) software lab under the GPL that works impeccably with Linux distributions. Clonezilla boasts high-performance cloning, simplified deployment and support for a multitude of system types (Windows, Linux and VMware), all of which make it a worthy competitor to its commercial counterparts.


This essentially means we have a tool that can replace an expensive purchase of Acronis True Image or Symantec's Ghost.


This matters, not just because it is platform agnostic, but it usually can talk to any Raid Controller that Linux can see and use (which is a large number) and it is free.


Supported Filesystems : (1) ext2, ext3, ext4, reiserfs, reiser4, xfs, jfs of GNU/Linux, (2) FAT, NTFS of MS Windows, (3) HFS+ of Mac OS, (4) UFS of FreeBSD, NetBSD, and OpenBSD, and (5) VMFS of VMWare ESX. Therefore you can clone GNU/Linux, MS windows, Intel-based Mac OS, and FreeBSD, NetBSD, and OpenBSD, no matter it's 32-bit (x86) or 64-bit (x86-64) OS. For these file systems, only used blocks in partition are saved and restored. For unsupported file system, sector-to-sector copy is done by dd in Clonezilla.


Image repository locations: NFS, SSH, SMB (Samba/Windows share), or Local Device (drive)


Local Live CD or network server compatible


Fast, i have seen full computer images (windows 7 with software) dropped from USB and Network locations to disk in 10 minuets.


But thats enough of an introduction have some hard links.


http://clonezilla.org/ - Main Website
http://clonezilla.org/clonezilla-live.php - Initial Live CD page, good information here.
http://clonezilla.org/downloads.php - Downloads page, you can get the latest version here
I strongly recommend the Alternative Stable Release, it is Ubuntu based and has the broadest hardware support
http://clonezilla.org/clonezilla-live-doc.php - documentation, how-to's etc. they are in order with pictures
http://clonezilla.org/general-live-use.php - useful, good intro on booting and getting ready to go.
Articles that i find regarding Clonezilla that i will be shareing over time.


http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/10884 - Article from the Linux Journal






Gparted LiveCD - Opensource Disk partition manager!


http://gparted.sourceforge.net/livecd.php


If you have ever run across a need to alter the structure of a disk layout. perhaps you had multiple partitions that need to be combined. maybe you are looking to change your hard drive without reinstalling and need to adjust things. I have used this before, the exception to what I can access is definitely a Microsoft dynamic volume. it cannot alter that type of disk.


GPartEd stands for: Gnome Partition Editor


GParted is a free partition editor for graphically managing your disk partitions.


GParted is useful for tasks such as: creating space for new operating systems, restructuring disk space to separate user and operating system data, and copying partitions to enable upgrading to a larger hard disk drive.


Your hard disk drive or USB flash drive can be subdivided into one or more partitions. GParted enables you to reorganize your disk partitions while preserving the contents of these partitions.


Features


Create partition tables (e.g., msdos, gpt)
Perform actions with partitions such as: 


create or delete
resize or move
check
label
copy and paste
Manipulate file systems such as:
btrfs
ext2 / ext3 / ext4
fat16 / fat32
hfs / hfs+
linux-swap
ntfs
reiserfs / reiser4
ufs
xfs
For specific actions supported see detailed features.
Enable and disable partition flags (e.g., boot, hidden)
Align partitions to mebibyte (MiB) or cylinder boundaries
Attempt data rescue from lost partitions
Supports hardware RAID, motherboard BIOS RAID, and Linux software RAID.
Supports all sector sizes (e.g., 512, 1024, 2048, 4096 byte sectors)