Next: Software Required, Up: 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, for reorganizing disk usage, for copying data between hard disks and for “disk imaging” — replicating an installation on another computer.
This documentation is written with the assumption that the reader has some understanding of partitioning and file systems. If you want to learn more about these, the upcoming GNU Storage Guide is recommended reading.
GNU Parted was designed to minimize the chance of data loss. For example, it was designed to avoid data loss during interruptions (like power failure) and performs many safety checks. However, there could be bugs in GNU Parted, so you should back up your important files before running Parted. Also note that reiserfs support relies on libreiserfs, which does not fulfil the aforementioned requirement. The same holds for any external tools like ntfsresize.
The GNU Parted homepage is http://www.gnu.org/software/parted. The library and frontend themselves can be downloaded from ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/parted. You can also find a listing of mailing lists, notes for contributing and more useful information on the web site.
Please send bug reports to bug-parted@gnu.org. When sending bug reports, please include the version of GNU Parted. Please include the output from these commands (for disk /dev/hda):
# parted /dev/hda print unit s print unit chs print
Feel free to ask for help on this list — just check that your question isn't answered here first. If you don't understand the documentation, please tell us, so we can explain it better. General philosophy is: if you need to ask for help, then something needs to be fixed so you (and others) don't need to ask for help.
Also, we'd love to hear your ideas :-)