gparted is great
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| Author | Content |
|---|---|
| tuxchick Jan 24, 2007 8:49 AM EDT |
I still remember my early Linux days, when I had to use Partition Magic to set up dual-boot machines with winderz and Linux. My Linux-fu was weak, and my ignorance great. Then I discovered QTParted, and learned how to put GRUB in control of the bootloader, and how to set it up so that I could remove any and all operating systems and still have a functioning bootloader. Didn't need to keep dumb ole windoze as the host system, or any host operating system. That, my friends, is True Power. Partition Magic is still mired in the dark ages. It only support windows filesystems, which is just plain pitiful. Linux reads and writes nearly every computer filesystem there is. It seems that development on QTParted has stalled, so now I use GParted and life is good. Poor windblows lusers- imagine paying $69.95 for an inferior, feature-poor product like Partition Magic. |
| jimf Jan 24, 2007 9:03 AM EDT |
Yeah, I read this and remembered that I'd been meaning to erase that old unused swap that had been sitting there 'forever'. Literally, 2 minutes later it was added to sdb1. I rebooted into the volume (reiserfs) and it came up perfectly... So cool. Just remember boys and girls that this will change the volume sequence. You many have to do a little fstab and menu.lst editing. |
| tuxchick Jan 24, 2007 9:48 AM EDT |
OMG editing text files!! Nooo! So much for Jane and Joe Rockeater. |
| jdixon Jan 24, 2007 1:35 PM EDT |
> I still remember my early Linux days, when I had to use Partition Magic to set up dual-boot machines with winderz and Linux. You didn't start with loadlin? Shame on you. :) |
| dcparris Jan 24, 2007 6:38 PM EDT |
You used Partition Magic? I had to do all mine by hand. I bought the Using Linux book from Que, and it walked me through the partitioning setup - something like 4 times, iirc. Literally, the author copied and pasted the same freakin' instructions in 3 or 4 places. I guess a line like, "refer to page #23" was too much work. Sigh! In fact, I had to install Red Hat first, so I could make sure at least part of it got put on the 1st 100MB(?) - something like that - the MBR. I don't think GRUB was available yet, or at least not part of the RH 5.1 distro. I even did some sort of NCurses-based config for LILO to change the boot order. Actually, it was kind of fun. :-) |
| tuxchick Jan 24, 2007 7:34 PM EDT |
Oh man, what a lot of mossy old geekbeards. And it was uphill both ways in the snow. [violin plays sadly, wind howls] |
| dcparris Jan 24, 2007 9:49 PM EDT |
And then there's the time my horse fell on top of me on the way to school one icy winter morning. Out of school for a couple of months. I still can't believe my own wife bought that tale, hook, line and sinker. ;-) |
| bigg Jan 25, 2007 7:26 AM EDT |
> paying $69.95 for an inferior, feature-poor product like Partition Magic But the good thing about Partition Magic is that you can get a refund after (not if) it doesn't work. Our laptop with XP was too slow, so I wanted to put Ubuntu on it. My wife would not trust open source software, she said free software would just screw things up and then we wouldn't even be able to use Windows, as slow as it was. Partition Magic ran for two hours. It said the NTFS partition had been resized, so I rebooted. I got a boot error with no documentation anywhere to tell me what to do. So I reinstalled Windows, losing MS Office and the other proprietary garbage for which we had no way to reinstall due to lost activation numbers. I then tried to set up a dual boot with a partition for Ubuntu. Again, it wouldn't reboot. At that point my wife started shouting at me for screwing up the laptop. "I told you this would happen. Why didn't you just use the laptop even if it was slow? Idiot!" I reinstalled Windows, downloaded gparted, resized the Windows partition with no difficulty, installed Ubuntu, and it has worked flawlessly as a dual-boot machine ever since. The good thing is that it is very easy to get a refund. They even refunded sales tax and the $9 Staples coupon I used to buy Partition Magic. Since then, my wife has had much less faith in proprietary software and much more faith in free software. So in a sense, Partition Magic is helping the movement to free software. (Part of that is also the fact that the XP was pre-SP2, so imagine how long it took to install all of the security patches and updates.) |
| jdixon Jan 25, 2007 7:38 AM EDT |
> I still can't believe my own wife bought that tale, hook, line and sinker DC, all we have to do is say we're from WV, and people will believe anything. :) Oh, how are your Dad's computer travails going? |
| tracyanne Jan 27, 2007 2:02 PM EDT |
I gave a copy to my boss, who looked at it, asked how much it cost, and when informed it was free, threw it in the back of the software cupboard and paid a license fee for Partition Magic. |
| jimf Jan 27, 2007 2:16 PM EDT |
> how much it cost Yeah, seen that one before. An unfortunate result of rampant consumerism. People buy into it to the extent that 'if it can't be assigned a dollar value, it has no value'. Once again, stupid is as stupid does. |
| tuxchick Jan 27, 2007 2:17 PM EDT |
You gave your boss a copy of what? GParted doesn't come in a shrink-wrapped package. Did you hand him a cup of raw bits? No wonder he was confused. |
| tracyanne Jan 27, 2007 3:44 PM EDT |
quote:: GParted doesn't come in a shrink-wrapped package. Did you hand him a cup of raw bits? ;;quote I gave him a nice CD, that i'd burned from a download, with a pretty label designed and printed by me. You'd think he'd be grateful I went to so much trouble to save him some money. |
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