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.

Back to the pizza analogy. Here, in front of you there is a stack of pizzas which have been sliced and cut into rings. If it were just you and you were going for the Guiness book of record in pizza eating then that whole stack of pizza is for you to consume in a legacy of gluttony. Unfortunately you are not alone. How can you divide up the pizza?

KDE Partition Manager allows you to manage your disks, partitions and file systems: Create, resize, delete, copy, backup and restore partitions with a large number of supported file systems (ext2/3, reiserfs, NTFS, FAT32 and more).

Starting in December 2009, hard disk manufacturers began introducing disks that use 4096-byte sectors rather than the more common 512-byte sectors. Although this change is masked by firmware that breaks the 4096-byte physical sectors into 512-byte logical sectors for the benefit of the operating system, the use of larger physical sectors has implications for disk layout and system performance.

This article is an attempt to provide basic information about disk naming and partition numbering conventions, in non-technical terms, to those new to Linux. I believe a basic understanding of all the aspects concerning how a disk is referenced and partitioned will put you in a better position to troubleshoot installation and disk-related problems.

GParted (Gnome Partition Editor) is a wonderful open source application that will allow you to easily work with the partitions of your HD. You can add, delete, resize, copy, and move partitions all with an easy interface.

This 6-part article series presents new features and improvements in the new version of the best Linux partition manager. Presented are mount management, SMART status reports, support for 4096-Byte sectors, improved size dialog, new configuration options, GPT partition tables, new file systems support, partition table import/export, shredding...

For simple resizing of your existing Windows partition, Norm has done a good job in showing you how to get it done with Easus. If you want to do more, such as creating new partitions of different file format (such as Ext3 or HFS), then Gnome Partition Editor (Gparted) is the one for you.

Most users know about proprietary software packages such as Norton Ghost that can be used for cloning hard disks for backup or distribution purposes. And a few may know about Partition Image, an open source alternative for saving partition images. But how many users know about Clonezilla, an all-in-one cloning tool that promises both speed and power?