A partition management tool or partition manager is a software or command-line utility that allows you to create, resize, delete or manipulate disks and partitions on a system. All the information such as size, location, etc of a partition is logged in the partition table.
In this article, I will discuss some of the best GUI and command-line tools to manage partitions on a Linux system.
GParted
Gparted (also known as GNOME partition editor) is a free partitioning tool. It is a GUI application that uses GNU parted in the backend. Gparted is used to create, delete, or resize a partition without data loss.
Apart from this, it offers many other functionalities such as mirroring one partition with others. By using Gparted in a live OS you can edit any partition on a system.
The key features of GParted are –
- Free and opensource
- Nice GUI, you can easily manage your system partition
- It supports different kinds of storage devices such as hard disks, USB drives, SSDs, RAID devices, etc.
- Allows multiple actions on storage devices
- It can be used on a separate live CD
Fdisk
The fdisk is a command-line utitlity used for disk manipulation in Linux/Unix. It provides a text-based menu in the terminal for entering commands. By using Fdisk you can perform operations such as creating, viewing, resizing, deleting, or moving a partition on a hard disk.
When a partition on a hard drive is created, deleted, or modified it gets updated in the partition table. fdisk understands various partition tables including GPT, MBR, Sun, BSD, etc.
It comes preinstalled in various Linux systems so you don’t need to install it manually.
The key features of Fdisk are –
- Lightweight and fast
- Comes preinstalled with various Linux distributions
- You can create, manage or delete partitions through your terminal
- Allows modifying and organizing old drives
- You can copy data from one disk or partition to another
GNU Parted
Linux/Unix operating system provides various tools for disk partitioning and manipulation. GNU parted is one of them that can be used to create, view, delete, and modify partitions of a disk. It provides a text-based menu in the terminal for entering parted commands.
Parted is also come installed by default in various Linux distributions but if it doesn’t have in your system you can use one of the given commands to install it.
To install it on Debian/Ubuntu/Linux Mint, etc use –
sudo apt install parted -y
If you are using CentOS/RHEL or an aligned distribution then use –
sudo yum install parted -y
To install in Fedora use-
sudo dnf install parted -y
GNOME Disks
GNOME Disks or GNOME disk utility is a graphical frontend to the command line tool called udisk which is a part of the gnome-disk-utility package. It comes shipped by default with the GNOME desktop environment.
It is used for managing partition, S.M.A.R.T. monitoring, benchmarking disks, etc on a Linux system.
The key features of GNOME Disks are –
- Displays local and removable storage devices
- Can be used to view partitions and files systems
- Allows formatting of disk or media
- You can easily modify the partition on a system
- You can benchmark the performance of different disks or partitions
- SMART monitoring can display the reliability of a disk or partition
KDE partition manager
KDE partition manager is a disk partitioning tool that comes shipped with a KDE desktop environment. It provides a graphical user interface using which you can easily create, manage, format, or delete a partition on a system.
It can also back up file systems to files and restore such backups whenever required. It is written in C++ and uses the Qt toolkit.
The key features of KDE partition manager are –
- Free and opensource
- Simple and easy to use
- It supports various file systems including ext2/3/4, btrfs, reiserfs, NTFS, FAT16/32, JFS, XFS, and more
- Supports various actions related to disk management
- Makes use of already available external programs to get its job done
Download KDE partition manager
QtParted
QtParted is a free and opensource partition manager. It is the Qt4 frontend of the GNU parted command-line tool in Linux. You can easily use it for creating, managing, resizing, or formatting a partition or disk.
QtParted offers builtin support for resizing the NTFS filesystem. It is the official partition manager for KDE desktops after KDE partition manager.
The key features of QtParted are –
- Free and opensource
- Simple and easy to use GUI
- Supports various filesystems including NTFS
- You can perform multiple actions on storage devices
- Supports different kinds of storage devices
Partmod
Partmod is a free and opensource cross-platform disk partitioning tool. It can perform all the disk partitioning tasks such as creating partition, managing, formatting and deleting it.
This tool is completely written using the C++ programming language.
The key features of Partmod are –
- Free and open-source
- Can be installed on different platforms
- Offers GUI which make disk partitioning tasks even easier
- It can create/delete MBR and GPT partitions
- It can create partition table backups
I hope this article is useful to you, partition manager is an essential tool for a system. By using it you can easily manage disks or partitions manager on a Linux system.
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