Managing your Hard Drive Partitions with DiskDrake

Partitions are initially set up during the installation process. DiskDrake allows you, to some extent, to resize your partitions, move them, etc. DiskDrake can also deal with RAID devices and supports LVM but we will not discuss these advanced uses here.

[Warning] Warning

DiskDrake is very powerful and can therefore be a dangerous tool. Misuse could very easily lead to data loss on your hard drive. Because of this potential loss of data, you are strongly advised to take some protective measures before using DiskDrake:

  1. Back up your data. Transfer it to another computer, or the removable medium of your choice.

  2. Save your current partition table (the table describing how your disks are organized) to a floppy disk (see the section called “DiskDrake's Action Buttons”).

The Interface

DiskDrake enables you to manage partitions on each physical hard drive on your machine, and also on removable drives: USB hard disks, keys, memory cards, etc. You can see as many tabs as hard drives your system has. Each tab is named after the Linux name for that drive (for example: sda for the first hard disk).

The window (see Figure 2, “DiskDrake's Main Window”) is divided into four zones:

  • Top. The structure of your hard drive. When you launch DiskDrake it will display the current structure of the drive. The display is updated as you make changes.

  • Right. A menu relevant to the partition currently selected in the above diagram.

  • Left. A description of the selected partition.

  • Bottom. Buttons for executing general actions. See the section called “DiskDrake's Action Buttons”.

We will now review the actions available through the buttons at the bottom of the window, and then describe a practical use case.

DiskDrake's Action Buttons

Clear all

Clicking on this button will clear all partitions on the current hard drive.

More

Displays a dialog allowing you to reload the partition table, use it to restore the partition table to the state it was in when you started custom partitioning.

Toggle to expert mode

This button allows you to access the expert mode functions (which are even more dangerous if you are not sure what you are doing). Reserved for experts.

Help

Displays documentation in a browser window.

Done

Saves your changes and exits DiskDrake.

[Note] Note

You may not remember the content of existing partitions. Click on View, you will be able to browse content of all your partitions