Don’t Understand Drive Partitions? This Short Book Can Help

It’s not too often we receive a request to take a look at a book, and to be honest, it’s not something we’ve ever considered doing. However, when the latest request involved a book revolving around one of my favorite Linux tools ever, GParted, I couldn’t help but dive in. Even better, it’s authored by Curtis Gedak, team leader of the GParted project for the past four years.

The ultimate goal of this book is to teach you how to manage your partitions with GParted, but there’s quite a bit of information here that will help you understand exactly how partitions work, not only how to fiddle with them. Not all operations discussed will be required by everyone, so each lesson is separated by “Must know”, “Should know” and “Become an expert”.

Topics include identifying the proper disk device; checking and repairing a partition; shrinking, growing, copying and moving a partition; preparing a drive for an OS install; creating a GPT RAID; rescuing lost data and even has bonus tips involving editing iPod or virtual machine partitions.

Here are a couple of pages to help you gain an idea of what you can expect to read:

(Note, the images are clearer when the PDF is viewed at a higher resolution)

If you’re already familiar with partitions, then there’s no need for this book. As I’ve been dealing with partitions and especially GParted for some time, I can’t really say that I learned anything from the book. However, despite that being the case, I still really enjoyed it because of how well it was written and structured. There’s no doubt in my mind that someone who’s either totally unfamiliar with partitions or someone who needs to brush up on things can benefit quite significantly from it. Plus, it’s involved entirely around a totally free partition management tool + OS, GParted Live CD – one that we took a look at six years ago.

The book, officially called “Manage Partitions with GParted How-to” is published through Packt Publishing and available in a variety of different formats for $4.24 (as of the time of writing). A very small price to pay for well-told explanations.