1 Topic by oldefoxx

  • oldefoxx
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Topic: What GParted Could Have That Would Help

Gparted is pretty good, but it suffers some lacks, at least in my case.  First, I have a 300 GB and two 500 GB hard drives in my PC.  So it is painfully slow after any Applies that it does a rescan of all the partitions on all the drives.  Why not just note which drive or drives is effected, and only rescan them to speed things up?  And if you are only working with one partition, why not limit the rescan to just it?  That would speed things up a lot.

Second, the Partition Table gets really whacky after some partitions are deleted, resized, added, and reformatted.  The only option is to create a partition table, which effectively wipes the whole drive.  Why not a Create New Partition Table, which restores the original 1 ... n sequence of Partition designations, but leave everything else as it is?  That would be great.

Third, because the Partition Table gets all whacky. several Linux Distros now prefer to use the UUID method of identifying the particular partition.  The suggestion above could take care of that, because the UUID method has its own concerns.  One, being that resizing a partition or moving it involves a reformat, and the reformat creates a new and different UUID.  Why isn't there an option to reuse the existing UUID for the same partition after it undergoes that reformat?  Or allow the user to designate a UUID to use in its place?  That would help a lot sometimes.

Fourth, since we are moving into the UUID world, why not have an option to show the existing UUID for each and any partition?  If it can be determined what operating system is installed there, why not have a way to indicate that as well?  All this would be of benefit.

Fifth, reveal the boot method that appears on certain partitions, with the option to copy that boot as-is to a different partition.  On my PC, due to a certain issue with how the BIOS sees a mix of SATA and EIDE drives, what is designated as drive sda is actually sdb, and vice-versa.  So grub ends up on the wrong drive (1, instead of 0).  This would be an easy way to fix that by just copying it over.  It would also be an easy way to cause a USB external or thumbnail drive to be updated to recognize internal drive installs as well, which might enhance some recovery processes.

2 Reply by gedakc

  • gedakc
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Re: What GParted Could Have That Would Help

Thank you for your interest in GParted and suggestions for improvement.

oldefoxx wrote:

Why not just note which drive or drives is effected, and only rescan them to speed things up?  And if you are only working with one partition, why not limit the rescan to just it?

Regarding the suggestion to scan only the changed partition, when changes are made to any partition it is safest to re-read the entire partition table.  That way GParted re-sync's with the kernel's view of the partition table.  If these two views ever diverge, then data loss becomes likely.  This is extremely important with logical partitions in an MS-DOS partition table since these are chained from one partition to another and not stored at a specific location on the disk.

The suggestion to scan just the affected drive would be possible, but requires some significant coding changes to implement.  If this were undertaken, my suggestion would be take this a step further and only scan a device when it is selected either from the menu, or the drop down list.


oldefoxx wrote:

Why not a Create New Partition Table, which restores the original 1 ... n sequence of Partition designations, but leave everything else as it is?

This sounds like a request to place partitions in disk order, which would be a nice to have feature.  smile

oldefoxx wrote:

One, being that resizing a partition or moving it involves a reformat, and the reformat creates a new and different UUID.   Why isn't there an option to reuse the existing UUID for the same partition after it undergoes that reformat?  Or allow the user to designate a UUID to use in its place?

Which version of GParted are you using?  The latest version is 0.4.8.

Moving or resizing a partition does not involve a reformat, with the exception of Linux Swap.  This is because I have not found a resize command for Linux Swap.  In the case of Linux Swap, GParted reformats using the previous UUID and volume label.

oldefoxx wrote:

Fourth, since we are moving into the UUID world, why not have an option to show the existing UUID for each and any partition?  If it can be determined what operating system is installed there, why not have a way to indicate that as well?

The UUID is displayed when the menu option "partition -> information" is selected.

If you know of a free open source software tool that will indicate which operating system is installed, then please let me know.  Perhaps it can be called from GParted to add this information.

oldefoxx wrote:

Fifth, reveal the boot method that appears on certain partitions, with the option to copy that boot as-is to a different partition.

If you know of a free open source software tool that will indicate the boot method then please let me know.

Due to the many different partition tables and boot managers out there, it is dangerous territory to try copying the boot sector from one drive to another.  The partition table and boot method are often mixed together in the first sector of the drive.

For an example see the following description of the MSDOS Partition Table Master Boot Record:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Master_boot_record