In this article I will walk you through the process of copying a partition from one drive to another with the help of Gparted.

First things first

Before you get too involved with this process there are a couple of things you will need to know. First and foremost the ONLY way you can copy and paste a partition is if that partition is not mounted. So if that partition is on a working system, and you need that partition mounted for the system to be working, you can not just install Gparted and have at it. Instead you have to use a live CD with Gparted included, such as SystemRescueCD. With this live CD you can boot up and then run Gparted on the drive in question without any problems.

You will also need to have an external drive attached with equal or more space than the source partition. And this space needs to have enough unused space on it to accommodate the partition to be copied.

How it’s done

Figure 1

When you fire up your live cd you will need to open up a terminal window and issue the command gparted to use the tool. Normally Gparted need to be run with root privileges, but since you are using a live cd you won’t need this. When you fire up Gparted you will see your first drive listed (see Figure 1). As you can see there is a 144.42 Gb partition to copy. From that drive select that partition that will serve as the source and click the Copy button. You can also right-click the selected partition and select Paste from that menu.

Figure 2

Now click the drive drop-down and select your second drive (this will be the external drive attached to the machine). With this drive selected you should see plenty of unallocated space (see Figure 2). If you do not, you will have to make room by resizing the existing partition. Select that unallocated space and then click the Paste button. You can also right-click the selected space and choose Paste from that menu.

Figure 3

When you click the Paste button (or menu entry) a new window will open that wants you to define how much of the unallocated space to use (see Figure 3).

As you can see, in my example, there is plenty of unused space on the partition being copied. I could shrink that partition to make room for something else on that drive (should I need to). If this partition is going to be then copied to another machine, you really don’t need to worry about resizing – so long as it will fit in the unallocated space.

Once you are done, click the Paste button and the partition will be pasted. Of course the action isn’t finalized until you have clicked the Apply button. Once you have done that, there is no going back – your partitions will be copied. Make sure you leave yourself plenty of time as this can be a lot of data to copy.

Final thoughts

It’s not the most elegant solution, but it works and works extremely well. Using Gparted to copy partitions from one drive to another is a great way to rescue a working system from a dying one. You might want to practice this on a non-critical machine before you do so on mission critical hardware. Just in case.

What exactly is a Live CD? A Live CD is a CD (or flash drive) that contains a complete and bootable operating system that is run directly from the CD and not the hard drive. There are many types of Live CDs that serve different purposes. There are live distributions for repairing Windows or Linux systems (such as SystemRescueCD). There are live cds for nearly every Linux distribution that allow you to test and/or install the distribution (Ubuntu, Fedora, OpenSuSE, Mandriva, ELive). You can even do stress testing and benchmarking with Live CDs like Inquisitor. Or what about a complete, embedded firewall distribution m0n0wall.

Why Use a Live CD?

The main purpose of a Live CD is to test drive Linux. A Live CD runs directly from the CD and the PCs RAM and does not even need a hard disk to run. Because of this, you can rest assure that a Live CD is not going to alter your hard disk unless you actually choose to install the Live CD onto your drive.

There are many reasons why a Live CD would be preferred. For instance, hardware diagnostics. I have employed Puppy Linux on numerous occassions in order to get information on a piece of hardware or test to see if a piece of hardware is working. I have also used that same Live distribution to run older machines where only certain functions are necessary. Live CDs are also great choices for cafes where you want to start with a clean slate every day. Another great use for a Live CD is when a machine has no mutable storage (a hard drive) and you want to run the computer as a pseudo “dumb terminal” or “thin client”. This would allow users to execute certain tasks so long as they didn’t need to save any work.

But what if you want to save information? For that you can use the flash drive-based Live distributions. With a large enough flash drive the user can also save data as well as run the operating system. If you’re looking for a pre-installed solution Mandriva has the Mandriva Flash Drive which has 6 gigs of free space for data.

One of the best reasons for using a Live distribution, in my opinion, is testing to see if that distribution works well with the hardware you have. I have one particular laptop that, when it comes time to upgrade operating systems, I wind up burning numerous distributions onto CD and running each one of them until one of them can work with the finicky hardware on that machine.

Drawbacks

One of the biggest drawbacks of using a Live CD is the speed. Remember, you are running this from RAM so the amount of RAM the machine has (as well as the speed of the CD drive) will determine how fast your Live CD distribution will run. So a machine with low RAM will run poorly. This isn’t such an issue if you are planning on installing immediately. But using the Live CD on a low-RAM machine will be painfully slow.

The other drawback was already mentioned, unless you are using a flash drive-based Live distribution, you can not save data. If you are only testing the distribution out to see if you like it, that’s not a problem.

Final Thoughts

Live CDs are here to stay. They have many uses and few drawbacks. If you are hesitant to use a Live CD because you don’t want to lose data, you shouldn’t worry about that (unless you accidentally click the installation button and accidentally click through all of the steps to install the operating system.)