GParted 1.2.0 Live CD & USB Image: Nimble and Effective

Continuing the theme of Debian based rescue distributions, simply because most of them are built on Debian, I am looking at GParted this week as last one in this short series. GParted is of course known as a tool to work with and edit partitions that is included with most distributions where it could be considered a de facto standard. But it also lends its name to a rescue CD image where it is at the centre of the collection of tools.

Images are updated frequently, about every two months, but core functionality stays the same so there is no need to focus on numbers too much. That said, I downloaded the gparted-live-1.2.0-1-amd64.iso which was 387 MB in size and is using the 5.10 Linux kernel. 1.2.0-2 is currently in testing. These newer builds are based on the unstable branch of Debian for obvious reasons, to stay relevant with support for newer hardware, but are in themselves considered stable.

The systemd software is running under the hood. With its small size GParted can be written to USB, CD or DVD and is available for i686 and x86_64 architectures, as ISO or extractable USB image. There‘s also a PAE enabled version for 32-bit computers. The 64-bit version supports booting UEFI machines. The home page advises to have a minimum of 320 MB RAM available.

Boot options

From the menu we can boot with default settings which should be fine for most, use KMS with large fonts and loading into memory, boot from local disk, run memtest or, third option from the top, choose other modes. 

These other options are to also boot into RAM, presumably not with larger fonts enabled, use safe graphics settings or go into fail safe mode.

Other options

Booting the GParted disc in Virtualbox worked with full mouse integration but in operation desktop icons were unresponsive at times and the display did not resize in Virtualbox 6.1.18. Given that this is a tool that is largely intended to run and rescue partitions on bare metal I won‘t hold that against it. The session was useful though to take screenshots of the boot menu and initial configuration steps. In Virtualbox, if choosing the second boot option for larger fonts and to RAM this will increase resolution for the initial configuration to 1024x768, up from 800x600. It started fine on my UEFI-enabled ASUS Vivobook with an eigth generation i7.

After booting we get to choose keyboard layout and language and are then asked how we want to start the graphical desktop, i.e. startx with automatically detected settings or force a mode. It then shows a short notice regarding Debian and free software and the kernel used.

The distribution then launches into the Fluxbox desktop with the GParted tool open and ready. The Fluxbox desktop and menu are extremely nimble and fast and its low requirements should make it possible to run it even on very old machines with little memory.

Default desktop

The partition editor is in version 1.2.0. and should not need any detailed explanation as it is the exact same used by other distributions for managing partitions through a graphical interface. With this we can create partition tables, create, move and resize partitions, format and change file systems, set the boot flag and toggle flags on a partition, view information about a disk or partition, set labels and new UUID, and even attempt data rescue and check and repair the file system.

There is little information on how to use the tool but IF one knows the terms used it‘s quite self-evident. The help menu includes a link to online content but this does little more than stating the obvious of which buttons do what. A big plus however is that all file systems are supported out of the box and that to make full use of it in a variety of environments the distribution does not require any more file system utilities to be installed. 

File system support built in

Apart from this a number of applications are included. The collection consists of Lxterminal (with an extra entry in the menu to start with root privileges), a script to take screenshots from a very basic GUI dialogue, the Geany, Vi and Nano editors, the PCMan file manager as well as Midnight Commander, a calculator and the Netsurf web browser. Network access is configured via terminal launched from the corresponding menu entry. I did not see any easy wireless support baked in but this won‘t matter for the local job of disk recovery and in wired LAN settings.

Testdisk, Partimage and a tool to test hard drive health via SMART are also included. Partimage is letting us image, backup and restore partitions and drives or just restore the MBR. It has options to back up to a server and encrypt the transfer with SSL. For this it would be useful to have network access which would at least in professional setups always be wired and this would also be advisable for home use.

For users who prefer the terminal, GParted can also be run from the command line and Fdisk is also on board, just as Fsarchiver allows to archive and restore file systems from the terminal. Take a look at all the applications included in GParted Live.

We can add further packages to the live environment thanks to apt and apt-get.

Website

The project‘s website, while not as fully featured as some others, offers tips for more advanced users on how to use it on a PXE server, add packages and create our own spin of a custom GParted Live from scratch and how to run it from hard drive in a boot partition. The last one may be interesting for many people as in essence it provides us with a local rescue system utilising the boot partition.

The site also features instructions on how to compile the application from source code and get involved as a developer and a page where happy users can donate via Paypal.

Conclusion

Testdisk and GParted are common tools that come with many other rescue distributions. All in all I feel this distribution falls somewhere between Rescatux and Rescuezilla which we have looked at previously, leaning more towards the disk imaging, backup and restore capabilities of the latter. The GParted Live image combines many aspects of both but also includes other tools like Partimage and, except the program at the heart of it, is leaning more towards terminal applications where others provide a graphical wizard.

Using instructions from the web pages it appears very versatile while managing to stay small at around 400 MB and requiring little RAM, thereby being not only a fast download but also faster to write and able to boot in environments with restricted RAM, it is also small enough to fit in a local boot partition to be used for rescue jobs, although that won‘t help if Grub is corrupted and unable to find and load it.

Perhaps the best, or at least one of the main benefits of the Live CD is that support for all file systems is pre-installed. A fine tool to work with Mac, Linux, BSD and Windows machines alike.

Ideally I would have also wanted a rootkit hunter and a virus scanner included as this would qualify in the wider sense as working with file systems, but perhaps it‘s a step too far into the security domain. As it stands, short of spinning our own, it seems we will always have to have several rescue distributions in the drawer to be prepared for all cases.