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Apr 13, 2021 GParted is a free partition manager developed to help you graphically manage your disk partitions. Using this utility app, you can resize, copy, and move partitions without data loss. This will enable you to grow or shrink your drive and create space for new operating systems. Gparted iso - Note: the version linked to this page is the latest stable release. The performance of your PC decreases more and more each day. Then, formatting is not always the best solution as you can partition your systems. Gparted is a formatting software.

‘gparted’ is the graphical version of ‘parted’ and is the tool to use to resize the main partition used for raspbian (or you could use use parted if you prefer the command line of course!). It can also be used to check and repair a SD card disk.

To do this you’ll need to put the SD card you want to work on in a USB to SD card adaptor and boot your RPi from a separate SD card. If you’d rather use a windows tool we’ve found that gparted just works whereas all of the windows based partition managers we tried don’t, so better to just get over the hassle factor and use the RPi to do this if you don’t have a separate Linux system.

Installing gparted on the separate Raspbian SD card that will perform the change

From the command line use:

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get upgrade

Gparted Live Usb

sudo apt-get install gparted

Running gparted

To run it use ‘sudo startx’ to load the GUI as gparted needs root user privileges

Then from the start menu select run and enter ‘gparted’

Resizing Your Main Partition

From the top bar devices drop down select “dev/sda” (or whatever your external USB adaptor has been called).

Right click somewhere on the graphic and select ‘unmount’ first as operations can’t be carried out on a mounted partition.

Right click the main ‘ext4’ partition and select ‘check’, then click the green tick and let it check the partition for you (this isn’t essential but its a good idea as if there are issues it will likely cause the resize to fail).

Right click the main ‘ext4’ partition and select ‘resize’ then enter the new size you want it to be.

Right click the main ‘ext4’ partition and select ‘check’ (we’ve found this to be necessary to ensure the new partition size is correctly updated in the file system even though it should be done as part of the resize – kept us chasing constantly failed resizes for hours before we discovered this).

Finally click the green arrow button to carry out the changes.

Reboot the RPi (yep its stupid but we’ve found a reboot to be needed even after removing and re-inserting the SD card), sudo startx, run gparted, select the USB drive and check the ext4 partition is locked again (mounted) and has its boot string back.

Let me describe what I did in the demonstration at the SIG meeting, North side. We installed in an external hdd the gpt with a single partition. The controlling computer was my netbook, so we first booted to gparted, using the memory stick with a copy of bootable gparted. The next step is to select the disk to install the gpt. There is a complete loss of data on the selected disk, so it is important to select the correct disk. It is useful to have different size disks, to facilitate differentiation between the disks. To select the disk, click on the GParted menu item and from the drop down list select the disk on which the gpt will be installed and which will be wiped clean of all data. This is a critical step, which, unfortunately will be different on different machines. I consider that it is least confusing not to attempt to describe one particular situation because it will only apply for that particular machine. You will have to figure this out for yourself.

Once the correct disk is identified, the rest is relatively smooth sailing. Click now on the menu item Device and find an option Create Partition Table. Click on it and see a dire warning Warning. This will erase all data on the entire disk etc. Heed the warning - this is your chance to go back and re-check your settings. If you decide to proceed, click on the Advanced button. The image will change to something similar to the following.

How To Use Gparted

You can still escape by canceling the process! Now click on the button marked msdos and from the drop down list select gpt. Select it and select the options to proceed. Then create the desired number of primary partitions, format them with the desired file system add the partition labels - all in much the same way as we used to do with msdos style partition table.

Enjoy!