If you ever need to partition or edit the partitions on your hard drives without an existing OS on the computer, then GParted Live should be in your PC toolbox.

via PCWorld

Things go wrong. Hard disks fail and whole servers crash. Luckily, many Linux-based distributions are available to help systems administrators handle minor catastrophes. We looked at four of the most portable, all of which fit on a 210MB mini CD — SliTaz, Parted Magic, GParted, and RIPLinuX.

We all fill up our hard-drives from time to time, but thanks to Gnome GParted, rearranging disk partitions isn’t as terrifying as it used to be. In fact, armed with a GParted Live CD, there’s a swathe of disk space fiddling jobs I can tackle without gnawing my fingers to the bone:

“Okay, little Percival, let me tell you what partitioning was like in the old days. If you already had information on your hard drive, but wanted to re-partition it, all your data would be erased. There were programs available that would partition your drive without erasing all your stuff, but they cost money.”

UnlikePartimage or ntfsclone, which only for partitions. Clonezilla, containing some other programs, can save and restore not only partitions, but also a whole disk.
Unlike G4U or G4L, in Clonezilla, if file system is supported, only used blocks in harddisk are saved and restored. This increase the clone efficiency.

You probably don’t need to be told how important — make that critical — it is to regularly back up your company’s data. But it’s almost as important to have complete system backups as well, because desktop systems have become complicated beasts — containing updates and patches, user profiles, application preferences and myriad other customized settings. Restoring these can take hours or even days, during which time you have an unproductive employee.

This article provides a gentle introduction to how a simple Knoppix configuration can become an indispensable item in a mobile technical toolkit.

A GNU/Linux live CD distribution can come handy for hardware diagnostics. For this purpose, my favorite live CD distribution is GRML, which bundles the tools we’re about to discuss, along with some other useful programs for both home users and veteran system administrators.