GParted Live CD

Couple weeks ago my parents picked up a 1TB (that was SO cool like 5 years ago…) external USB drive to store some data and use for backups of the other computers. Oddly enough, the Windows box decided to crash right after that drive got purchased… and we discovered that the backup software we were using was crap. It was supposed to make compressed images of the data on the partitions, but when we tried to put it back it complained that files were corrupted and it wouldn’t boot. I had a copy of Copy Commander laying around, it has a straight copy partition to partition function, and that seems to work fine, but it won’t see the external USB drive. Off to google! Few minutes later, I found the GParted live CD, and downloaded it. It’s only about 90MB, way smaller than most of the Linux utility CDs. It’s a very stipped down (no networking, no ping command…) version of Debian running fluxbox (yay!) and running the GParted partition tool. It’ll shrink, stretch, make, remove, copy, and do just about anything you want with Windows and Linux partitions of two dozen odd formats, including NTFS for all those XP users that wanna dual boot but need to resize their XP partition. I think it also has some tools to do data recovery of a disk, plus the standard memory tester that comes on Linux distro’s all the time (especially Debian based). Go burn a copy, it’s handy I tell you!

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