Gparted is a GTK (Gnome)-based partition manager that can also be used with KDE. This utility works best as a LiveCD. Download the Gparted .ISO image here. Burn the .ISO image to CD. Use the GParted LiveCD as your partition manager. You can also install the package:

Backing up partitions and hard disks sounds like work -- until you've tried Clonezilla. With Clonezilla you can clone and duplicate partitions of various formats and disks of various sizes locally or over the network. Even more impressive is the fact that you can do all this without typing complicated commands.

No matter which operating system you want to have installed on your machine, there's one thing they all have in common: partitions. Being able to control the partitions is one of the most basic, most important aspects of mastering your operating system.

One of the things I love about GNU/Linux is the existence of LiveCD's. A live CD or live DVD is a CD or DVD containing a bootable computer operating system. Live CDs are unique in that they have the ability to run a complete, modern operating system on a computer lacking mutable secondary storage, such as a hard disk drive.

Gnome Partition Editor (gparted) has really been fantastic. Using it, I have added, removed, moved, enlarged and shrunk all sorts of partitions, all without ever losing anything.

There might be the situation, that your root filesystem runs out of space, so it has to be expanded. With filesystems other than the root filesystem this could easily be done for instance with gparted. With the root filesystem this is not possible, as gparted could only expand filesystems that are not mounted, which is impossible with the root filesystem.

The last time I needed to install Ubuntu on a system without a CD drive, my Eee PC, I created a bootable USB drive to run the graphical installer. The UNetbootin tool I used makes creating the USB system simple, but in Ubuntu 8.10 theres an even easier way.

A physical disk device can be subdivided into one or more partitions on which the operating system can read and write data. GParted enables you to change the partition organization on a disk device while preserving the contents of the partitions.

GParted is an excellent GNOME program for editing partitions, changing file-systems, and performing related disk tasks. However, GParted is not exactly the ideal program for new Linux users to familiarize themselves with if all they want to do is format a USB drive or external storage device.