The GParted LiveCD is a bootable user interface which allows you to visually manage and edit your partitions. Partitions allow you to instruct your computer that a 100GB drive is actually two 50GB hard drives, or several smaller drives. With Gparted you can resize, create/format, and delete partitions with a only a few clicks. After booting the LiveCD you’ll be presented with the main Gparted interface :
- Select which hard drive you want with this scrollable list
- Visually select which partition to edit with this graph
- Select a partition from this detailed list
- Perform various actions on the selected partition
How to resize an existing partition
If you only have one operating system installed it is likely that your hard drive contains one large partition. In order to install Ubuntu Studio, you’ll need to resize your single partition into two unique partitions.
If you are resizing a Windows partition you will need to defrag your drive several times before booting into GParted. Defragging reorganizes files that are scattered all over the place and neatly places them together at the beginning of the drive. This will allow you to create a partition from any free space which now resides at the tail end of the hard drive.
BACKUP YOUR FILES BEFORE YOU RUN GPARTED. DON’T WORRY. JUST IN CASE.
Linux partitions/filesystems do not need defragging. They do not vomit files all over the place like Windows. Once again for effect : Linux filesystems do not need to be defragmented, ever!
- Select the partition you want to modify
- Click the Resize/Move button
You can resize by dragging the black arrow on the right :
You can also manually type the size of the new partition into the Free Space Following box. We chose 20 GB, or 20000 MB :
Click Resize to return to the main interface. Take a minute to make sure everything looks right. There should be an ‘unallocated’ partition in the list.
- Your resize request has now been added to the queue
- Click the Apply button to create your new partition
Once your changes have been applied, you can shutdown the GParted LiveCD and boot into the Ubuntu Studio DVD.
Formatting an unallocated partition during the Ubuntu Studio install
Technically we haven’t created a partition yet. What we have done is free up a chunk of unallocated space. This space isn’t just empty, it doesn’t even exist! This is exaclty what we want. During the Ubuntu Studio install we can either manually select the FREE SPACE, or automatically format the largest continous chunk of free (unallocated) space
With your partitions properly configured you are now ready to install Ubuntu Studio from the official DVD.
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