GNU Parted

Table of contents

• Introduction
• Features
• Downloading
• CVS Access
• Documentation
• Reporting bugs
• Mailing List

Introduction

GNU Parted is a program for creating, destroying, resizing, checking and copying partitions, and the file systems on them. This is useful for creating space for new operating systems, reorganising disk usage, copying data between hard disks and disk imaging.

Features

Supported disk labels: raw access (useful for RAID and LVM), MS-DOS partition tables, Intel GPT partition tables, MIPS partition tables, PC98 partition tables, Sun and BSD disk labels and Macintosh partition maps.

Notes:

1. For ext2, ext3 and reiserfs: the start of the partition must stay fixed.
2. For ext2, ext3: the partition you copy to must be bigger or exactly the same size as the partition you copy from.
3. For ext2 and ext3: the checking is limited to ensuring the resize and copy commands will be ok.
4. For fat: the size of the new partition after resizing or copying is restricted by the cluster size. Parted can shrink the cluster size, so you can always shrink your partition. However, if you can't use FAT32 for some reason, you may not be able to grow your partition.
5. Parted supports both FAT16 and FAT32. Parted can convert file systems between FAT16 and FAT32, if necessary.
6. Reiserfs support is enabled if you install libreiserfs, available at http://reiserfs.osdn.org.ua. (It is likely to be available soon from http://www.namesys.com)

Downloading

The latest version of parted is : 1.6.21 (released 2005-01-16) here is the corresponding changelog Changelog

When released, all version of GNU Parted can be found on http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/parted/ or one of the mirrors.

Currently, Parted runs under GNU/Linux and GNU/Hurd. If you don't have either, then a boot disk image is available on all mirrors in the /gnu/parted/bootdisk directory.

• Debian's parted package
• Fedora

CVS Access

The cvs is in fact located on Alioth of the debian project and can be accessed here from the project page which is http://alioth.debian.org/projects/parted/.

There is actually 2 branch in the cvs: the stable(also known as 1.6.x) and the devel branch(also known as 1.7.x).

The release are only done in the stable branch and the devel branch is principally aimed at developer/tester.

Stable branch:

The easiest way to obtain source would be to grab the package into the ftp(see Downloading).

CVS access: You can access each older version with tags like this: rel-x-y-z. For example, version 1.6.20 would be rel-1-6-20 using stable as the modulename (see http://alioth.debian.org/projects/parted/ for more info on cvs access).

Devel branch:

The only way to get the Devel branch is to get it from cvs. Check the parted page on Alioth for information on how to do this (using devel as modulename): http://alioth.debian.org/projects/parted/

Documentation

Parted's documentation is available here in English and Japanese (old version).

Reporting bugs

The first thing to do is to try the latest version of parted, maybe we are already aware of the bug and it was fixed! But if you feel you have a somewhat rare setup, you may forward your bug to the mailing list to tell us that version x.x.x fixed the problem(if any) that version x.x.x had.

To reach the mailing list send an email to bug-parted@gnu.org , containing the problem encountered, the version of Parted, and the output of:

parted /dev/hda print

Mailing List

There is only one mailing list for GNU Parted, bug-parted@gnu.org. All discussion related to Parted is welcome. Subscription information and archives are available at http://mail.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/bug-parted