New user experience

Hello. This is my feedback from my experiencing using a GParted LiveCD v0.3-1.

My objective was to grow a Windows XP system partition and NTFS filesystem from 128GB to the 250GB size of the disk.  The partition had originally been created 128GB in size due to a bug in Windows XP installation CDs prior to SP2, and I wanted to use the entire disk for this system.  I have a Debian GNU/Linux based desktop next to my Windows computer, but I didn't want to move the hardware around, and so I chose to use a bootable Linux CD to do this.

GParted LiveCD did successfully accomplish the task that I desired, but I had a large number of serious problems.

The first problem was that X would not start.  I was dumped at the command line with X errors.  My hardware is a MSI K9N Platinum motherboard, NVIDIA 7900GT PCIE video card, and Viewsonic VP2130b LCD monitor.  Note that I also tried an older Knoppix DVD and it detected my video just fine.  Unfortunately, that Knoppix CD didn't have a working SATA driver for my motherboard, so I wasn't able to use it's qparted tool instead of the GParted LiveCD.

The X error was simply a sig 8;  XIO: Fatal IO error 104.

I rebooted the CD and selected the "Manual video card" option from the boot options selection menu.  However, the feedback from this menu system is terrible.  I was simply dumped back to the main menu, thinking that my selection had failed, so I hit it again a few times.

Fortunately, I didn't give up and selected the "Skip extra boot options" menu option and continued.  This time, X started without any trouble.  I am guessing that the "Manual video card" selection did actually do something, but did not provide any feedback that it had.

I started using gparted to look at the NTFS partition that I wanted to resize and grow.  This appeared to work fine, until I registered my first command to be process, at which point, a new gparted window and process started.

Even better was the fact that whenever I closed a gparted window, a new one started up.  By the time I stopped fooling around with it and continued with my task, I had six gparted windows running.

Eventually, I just worked with a single gparted window and ignored the new windows that opened.  I was successfully able to resize my NTFS partition and grow the filesystem.

Finally, when I hit the red power button to shut down the system, the CD ejected, but then instantly reloaded it, so I had to kick it out again and forcefully hold open the tray while I grabbed the CD, for it only wanted to close.

At this point, I was happy to hit the reset button.

When I booted to the Windows system on the resized disk, everything worked perfectly.  Unfortunately, the task was more difficult than necessary due to the above mentioned issues.

Good luck on fixing everything.  This is clearly a valuable tool.