Nowadays hard drive manufactures are switching to a new hard drive technology which uses 4KB sectors size instead of conventional 512B. This new technology requires little tweaks to get a better performance in comparison to out-of-the-box settings. This article will describe some simple to follow instruction on how to partition the WD EARS hard-drive to get better overall performance.

This tool has four uses: list hard drive partitions, size of particular partition, check partitions on hard disk, and repartition the drive.

How to dual-boot Fedora 15 and Ubuntu 11.04 on a computer with one hard disk is the subject of this tutorial. If you have ever configured dual-booting between Windows and a Linux distribution, the steps involved should be very familiar, but if you have not, this tutorial is detailed enough that you should not have any problems in setting this up on your computer – laptop or desktop.

If you read our "what's new in Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala" post, you must know that a new hard disk tool is now available by default in Ubuntu 9.10: Palimpsest Disk Utility, which was created by Red Hat and is a S.M.A.R.T.

Installing Ubuntu 11.04 or any other distribution on an external hard drive connected to a computer via USB is about the same as installing it on an internal hard disk. The key is to remember, after partitioning the disk, to install GRUB, the boot loader, in the MBR of the external disk, rather than in the MBR of the internal disk.

How to install Ubuntu 11.04 on external hard disk, showed how to install Ubuntu 11.04 on a portable USB hard drive. This tutorial, written for Ubuntu 11.10, takes it a step further by showing how to add an NTFS partition at the end of an external drive – after installing Ubuntu.

The installation program on Ubuntu desktop is pretty basic. It lacks the other features, like support for LVM, RAID, and full disk encryption, that the Ubuntu text installer edition has. By default, it creates just one partition onto which it installs everything.

...one of the computers ran out of hard drive space. So I had a bigger hard drive with four times the disk space handy, and swapped them. The steps:

For Window users switching to Linux or Ubuntu, performing simple tasks can be a challenge. One simple task such as checking free and used hard drive disk space on Ubuntu, is easy using the graphical utility Disk Usage Analyzer or from a Terminal window using the command df.