Using Gparted part 2

Last Saturday I decided that for this laptop I would be using two main OS's. AntiX as the main boot partition and Puppy Linux. With this in mind I wanted to increase the size of the AntiX partition but Gparted would not allow the deletions of hda5 and hda6 unless logical drives with a higher number were unmounted. Easy enough with hda7 which held AntiX but hda8 was a Linux swap partition and refused to unmount while booted to the hard drive in either OS. The solution was to boot with a Puppy Linux live cd and run Gparted from there. I was then able to unmount the Linux swap and delete the older hda5 and hda6 partitions. Next it was a simple matter to increase the size of hda7 which now became hda6. Since hda7 had previously held the bootable partition, I would still need to edit Grub's menu.lst file to recognize the changes. I should also mention that it is not recommended by Gparted to move partitions forward and it recommends backing up data. But in this case the home directory is safe on it's own partition hda2 and was untouched with this process so I didn't worry about backing up. In menu.lst I had to change two values to reflect the changes made. This is the section with the old values:

title MEPIS at hda7, newest kernel
root (hd0,6)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz root=/dev/hda7 nomce quiet splash vga=791 resume=/dev/hda8
initrd /boot/initrd.img
boot

and these are the new values:

title MEPIS at hda6, newest kernel
root (hd0,5)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz root=/dev/hda6 nomce quiet splash vga=791 resume=/dev/hda5
initrd /boot/initrd.img
boot

It's easy to see the values for the partition is what changed. If you move or change partitions that are holding the boot loader, in this case Grub, you will get an error if not edited. I now have three primary partitions and one extended partition holding two logical drives, Linux swap and hda6. I should also point out that Gparted lists the partitions as sda and Grub shows them as hda but the end results are the same. Here is a new screenshot of my hard drive showing the changes. You can compare changes with the previous post's screenshot.

Using Gparted

If dual booting is something you plan on doing then Gparted will become a very useful tool. Almost all distros will have this tool installed. If not it is easily aquired via most distros' repositories. Gparted stands for Gnome Partition Editor. The current release is version 0.4.5 and is also available at Sourceforge.net. Gparted can read various file systems including fat16/32, ntfs, ext2/3 and several more. If you need to create partitions, re-size them or simply format a drive, this tool can do the job. Do you need to copy or move an entire drive? Gparted can handle this too. I have only scratched the surface in my experience using Gparted. I have re-sized partitions on a laptop running Windows XP and Ubuntu 8.10 on a 120GB hard drive. I was able to change the size of both partitions without data loss or downtime. Here is a view from a 20GB hard drive I am running right now. I have Puppy Linux on the first partition, Mepis 8 on the hda3 (they are out of order since I had given too much room for Puppy and used Gparted to create hda3), on hda2 is the home partition being shared by all OS's. I created an extended partition and placed logical drives within it. AntiX resides on hda7 and there are two unused spaces left over. Using Gparted to manage this hard drive makes it possible and keeps it very simple. Let's hear what tools you use to manage drives?