Parted Magic: Now with added ZFS goodness

Parted Magic has been around a good long time now, and it’s something that every computer troubleshooter should have in his or her arsenal. If you’ve ever needed to recover partitions or data on a disk, or expand/shrink partitions then this is most likely the easiest and most comprehensive way to do it.

Parted Magic took its name from the now long defunct Partition Magic, which was a great tool in its day. Parted Magic goes further to an extent, bringing a veritable swiss-army knife of tools to the foray, from anything like serial terminal connection emulation to FileZilla for FTP.

Disk recovery tool highlights also include Clonezilla, a partition and disk imaging/cloning tool. Wxfixboot 2.0.1 for modifying and fixing bootloaders, as well as the DDRescue-GUI 1.7.1 graphical user interface for GNU ddrescue.

Something that had been lacking to date was support for the ZFS filesystem which has been growing in popularity, in this release that’s been addressed via adding the latest ZFS Linux kernel module. More comprehensive support is available for ext2/3/4, fat16/32, btrfs, NTFS (Windows file system), as well as HFS/HFS+ (Apple file system).

To use Parted Magic, you need only the most meagre of specs. Ideally 1GB of RAM (although 512MB is do-able in Live mode) and a Pentium class processor or above. It works on Intel based Macintosh computers as well, making it truly platform free, how’s that for versatile!

Other goodies

Finally, don’t forget that Parted Magic gets used for deleting hard drives properly and disk benchmarking, so you can be sure if your SSD drive is comparing to its factory specs or not!

Where can I get this good stuff?

Head on over to partedmagic.com and download the Live CD. Nothing to install!