1 Topic by Strolls (edited by Strolls 2010-01-17 08:55:27)

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Topic: Alternative live CDs? Knoppix? Other?

Hi there,

Can anyone suggest any alternative live CDs, please? Ones that feature GParted.

As I posted yesterday, I have a system on which the official GParted Live won't boot.

I have just tried the system with two versions of Knoppix that I have handy. Knoppix 5.3.1 (2008-03) fails whilst loading the kernel.

These problems don't particularly surprise me, as the system is not a common type of system - a Dell PowerEdge 2800 (a model released nearly 5 years ago now, I believe) with hardware RAID.

Knoppix 5.1.1 (2007-01) works great - GParted loads and recognises the disks, but the version of GParted on this live CD is only 0.2.5, which seems quite dated, and I am reluctant to use it on the NTFS partition of Windows 2003 Server that I want to resize.

I am looking for alternative LiveCDs featuring a safe release of GParted on them. I am backing up the drive fully (with dd) in preparation for this, but nevertheless, I would prefer it to work, otherwise I'm wasting my time trying.

Many thanks in advance for any suggestions,

Stroller.

2 Reply by SecretCode

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Re: Alternative live CDs? Knoppix? Other?

PartedMagic contains GParted - v4.6 is the latest - not sure what ver of GParted is on it - but you can also get older ones like 4.5, which has GParted 0.4.6.

3 Reply by gedakc

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Re: Alternative live CDs? Knoppix? Other?

System Rescue CD also contains GParted.  This Live CD starts in text mode.  To use GParted you need to start the "X" server with either "wizard" or "startx".

4 Reply by class413

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Re: Alternative live CDs? Knoppix? Other?

Knoppix 5.1.1 (2007-01) works great - GParted loads and recognises the disks, but the version of GParted on this live CD is only 0.2.5, which seems quite dated, and I am reluctant to use it on the NTFS partition of Windows 2003 Server that I want to resize.

Version 0.2.5 is known to be buggy. Don't use it, even in old systems.

*** It is highly recommended to backup any important files before doing resize/move operations. ***

5 Reply by Strolls

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Re: Alternative live CDs? Knoppix? Other?

Just an update for the benefit of Google, I used the Knoppix v6.2 (2009-11-18) CD in the end and this worked great on the PowerEdge 2800, although using the DRAC remote viewer I advise halting the boot and supplying the "no3d" cheatcode to Knoppix, which makes the desktop function normally (the CompWiz effects are unusable when viewed over the network).

This release of Knoppix carries quite a recent version of GParted - I can't now recall for sure, but I think it's 0.4.9.

I initially had problems as I was resizing the NTFS C: drive of a Windows 2003 Server installation. The partition was seen as larger in Computer Management > Disk Management, but not in Windows Explorer, which showed it at its original size. `chkdsk` had no effect, so I restored the original partition layout from a backup image and did some more research. I found some posts here suggesting to enlarge the partition to the full capacity of the disk and then reduce it slightly, and this had the desired effect. The system has been running with the resized partition for about 10 days now with no apparent problems.

Thanks to everyone who posted,

Stroller.