Parted Magic is a commercial

Linux distribution A Linux distribution (often abbreviated as distro) is an operating system made from a software collection that includes the Linux kernel and, often, a package management system. Linux users usually obtain their operating system by downloading one ...

based on

Slackware Slackware is a Linux distribution created by Patrick Volkerding in 1993. Originally based on Softlanding Linux System, Slackware has been the basis for many other Linux distributions, most notably the first versions of SUSE Linux distributio ...

that comes with

disk partitioning Disk partitioning or disk slicing is the creation of one or more regions on secondary storage, so that each region can be managed separately. These regions are called partitions. It is typically the first step of preparing a newly installed disk, ...

and

data recovery In computing, data recovery is a process of retrieving deleted, inaccessible, lost, corrupted, damaged, or formatted data from secondary storage, removable media or files, when the data stored in them cannot be accessed in a usual way. The dat ...

tools. It is sold as a

Linux Linux ( or ) is a family of open-source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged as a Linux distribution, whi ...

-based bootable disk. The distribution's nomenclature is derived from the names of the

GNU Parted GNU Parted (the name being the conjunction of the two words PARTition and EDitor) is a free partition editor, used for creating and deleting partitions. This is useful for creating space for new operating systems, reorganising hard disk usage, co ...

and

PartitionMagic PartitionMagic is a utility software program for hard disk drive partitioning originally made by PowerQuest, but subsequently owned by Symantec. As of December 8, 2009, the Symantec website stated that they no longer offer PartitionMagic. The ...

software packages.

Features

The program is directly bootable from a CD,

USB flash drive Universal Serial Bus (USB) is an industry standard that establishes specifications for cables, connectors and protocols for connection, communication and power supply ( interfacing) between computers, peripherals and other computers. A bro ...

, or through a network using PXE on PC hardware, and does not require installation, or the presence of an installed operating system. Although originally designed for mechanical

hard disk drive A hard disk drive (HDD), hard disk, hard drive, or fixed disk is an electro-mechanical data storage device that stores and retrieves digital data using magnetic storage with one or more rigid rapidly rotating platters coated with mag ...

s, Parted Magic is suitable for use also with solid state drives and can perform an

ATA Secure Erase Parallel ATA (PATA), originally , also known as IDE, is a standard interface designed for IBM PC-compatible computers. It was first developed by Western Digital and Compaq in 1986 for compatible hard drives and CD or DVD drives. The connection ...

(a method that is built into the hard drive controller to return the drive into its factory state). Parted Magic supports reading and writing to a variety of modern

file system In computing, file system or filesystem (often abbreviated to fs) is a method and data structure that the operating system uses to control how data is stored and retrieved. Without a file system, data placed in a storage medium would be one larg ...

s, including

ext3 ext3, or third extended filesystem, is a journaled file system that is commonly used by the Linux kernel. It used to be the default file system for many popular Linux distributions. Stephen Tweedie first revealed that he was working on ext ...

, ext4, FAT, exFAT, and

NTFS New Technology File System (NTFS) is a proprietary journaling file system developed by Microsoft. Starting with Windows NT 3.1, it is the default file system of the Windows NT family. It superseded File Allocation Table (FAT) as the preferred fil ...

, and as such is able to access disk drives formatted for use under

Microsoft Windows Windows is a group of several proprietary graphical operating system families developed and marketed by Microsoft. Each family caters to a certain sector of the computing industry. For example, Windows NT for consumers, Windows Server for ...

and Linux systems. The software distribution includes networking support, and comes with the

Firefox Mozilla Firefox, or simply Firefox, is a free and open-source web browser developed by the Mozilla Foundation and its subsidiary, the Mozilla Corporation. It uses the Gecko rendering engine to display web pages, which implements current ...

web browser.

System requirements

As of version 11.11.11, Parted Magic supports

x86-64 x86-64 (also known as x64, x86_64, AMD64, and Intel 64) is a 64-bit version of the x86 instruction set, first released in 1999. It introduced two new modes of operation, 64-bit mode and compatibility mode, along with a new 4-level paging ...

processors natively (

Intel x86 x86 (also known as 80x86 or the 8086 family) is a family of complex instruction set computer (CISC) instruction set architectures initially developed by Intel based on the Intel 8086 microprocessor and its 8088 variant. The 8086 was intr ...

processors were previously supported), and requires a computer with at least a 64-bit Intel-compatible processor and 2GB of

RAM Ram, ram, or RAM may refer to: Animals * A male sheep * Ram cichlid, a freshwater tropical fish People * Ram (given name) * Ram (surname) * Ram (director) (Ramsubramaniam), an Indian Tamil film director * RAM (musician) (born 1974), Dutch * ...

. Secure boot is also supported. x86 versions from 2013_09_26 do not require the

Physical Address Extension In computing, Physical Address Extension (PAE), sometimes referred to as Page Address Extension, is a memory management feature for the x86 architecture. PAE was first introduced by Intel in the Pentium Pro, and later by AMD in the Athlon proces ...

(PAE) computer processor feature. All versions starting from 2020_08_23 no longer support 32-bit x86 systems.

Availability

Up to version 2013.08.01 the distribution was freely available for download from the official website and the project page on SourceForge. The distribution moved to a pay-for-download business model, despite the packaged software being free and open source.

References

External links

Parted Magic at the Internet Archive
{{FLOSS Proprietary operating systems X86-64 Linux distributions Operating system distributions bootable from read-only media Data erasure software Data recovery software Linux distributions without systemd Linux distributions

Features

System requirements

Availability

See also

References

External links