The live cds you cannot live without : Gparted and Clonezilla.

May 26

Partitioning your harddrive when you have some data on it, is like doing brain surgery on your own best friend .. with blunt scissors, blindfolded, hanging upside down .. in the subwaycar .. while playing pingpong .. well , you catch my drift.  With your precious data on the drives, having to resize, move and add partitions is pretty dangerous. Of course you backed up all your data ( you ARE a ‘Wiseguy’ are you not ?) but still. A great tool that has always helped me in these precarious times is Gparted. Back in the days I had a “Copy” of Partition Magic (from Symantec) to do this. But that was because I was oblivious from the fact that Gparted existed. This free live cd (which is also a Linux app) helps you repartition any system without having to boot into the os. Get your copy here.

The other classic I remember was Symantecs Ghost !. When I had freshly installed a system I would make an image using Ghost for quick reinstalls should it be required. I even remembering re-imaging entire classrooms with Ghost, multicasting the data over the network. When I showed my skills to my colleagues at the time they thought it to be black magic ! A free (and much more powerful) “clone” of Ghost (no pun intended) is Clonezilla. A free and open source solution to do JUST that and more. Their website might make Geocities blush but, Get your copy here.

I have copies of these two disks lying around in my car and on a Usb stick along with some other essentials. Whenever you come across this one friend that needs brain surgery .. you will be happy you have them.

To help you along, Ive found some great tutorials on Youtube. The Gparted tutorial is a little dated but very well explained.

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