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GParted - Best Utility Ever

posted under category: General on April 24, 2007 by Nathan

I bought a new hard drive last week, along with my new video card. Now I had to figure out how to get all my data off of one drive and onto the other. The only thing I could think about was good old Norton Ghost, which surprisingly is still being made, version 10.0 now, but it's $70! Then there's Partition magic - another Symantec product and another $70! No thanks, when I know that the open source community has to have something better. And, of course, they do.

Free, in every way, the GParted LiveCD is a 40MB ISO Image that you burn to a CD, which then becomes a bootable Linux OS and application all-in-one that manages all your partitions and hard drives. When you boot with the CD in, it starts the GUI and GParted application which allows you to visually manage your drives and partitions. It slices and dices, it visually resizes. I copied and pasted my 2 partitions (I always have 1 for the OS and applications, one for everything else) onto my new drive, and it worked like a charm. It was very stable, very fast, and very easy to use (if you've ever managed partitions before). Plus, it saved me potentially $140.

I'm happy to say that my HDD migration went flawlessly thanks to GParted.

Nathan is a software developer at The Boeing Company in Charleston, SC. He is essentially a big programming nerd. Really, you could say that makes him a nerd among nerds. Aside from making software for the web, he plays with tech toys and likes to think about programming's big picture while speaking at conferences and generally impressing people with massive nerdiness and straight-faced sarcastic humor. Nathan got his programming start writing batch files in DOS. It should go without saying, but these thought and opinions have nothing to do with Boeing in any way.
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