Are you looking to tweak or manage your disks partitions in Linux? In this article, we will review some of the best tools that help Linux users partition and manage their disks. We will see both command line utilities as well as GUI applications for managing disk partitions in Linux.
Read Also: 9 Tools to Monitor Linux Disk Partitions and Usage in Linux
I favor the command line over GUI (graphical user interface), I will start by describing the text based utilities and then GUI applications as follows.
1. Fdisk
fdisk is a powerful and popular command line tool used for creating and manipulating disk partition tables. It supports multiple partition tables formats, including MS-DOS and GPT. It provides a user-friendly, text based and menu driven interface to display, create, resize, delete, modify, copy and move partitions on disks.
2. GNU Parted
Parted is a popular command line tool for managing hard disk partitions. It supports multiple partition table formats, including MS-DOS, GPT, BSD and many more. With it, you can add, delete, shrink and extend disk partitions along with the file systems located on them.
It can help you create space for installing new operating systems, reorganizing disk usage, and move data to new hard disks.
3. Gparted
GParted is a free, cross platform and advanced graphical disk partition manager that works on Linux operating systems, Mac OS X and Windows.
It is used to resize, copy, move, label, check or delete partitions without data loss, enabling you to grow or shrink root partition, create space for new operating systems and attempt data rescue from lost partitions. It can be used to manipulate file systems including EXT2/3/4.
4. GNOME Disks a.k.a ( GNOME Disks Utility)
GNOME Disks is a core system utility used for disk partition management and S.M.A.R.T monitoring. It is used to format and create partition on drives, mount and unmount partitions. It ships in with the well known GNOME desktop environment.
Lately, it’s been gaining features for advanced usage. The latest version (at the time of this writing) has a new feature for adding, resizing partitions, checking filesystems for any damages and repairing them.
5. KDE Partition Manager
KDE partition manager is a useful graphical utility for managing disk devices, partitions and file systems on your computer. It comes with the KDE desktop environment.
Most of its underlying work is performed by programs. It can be used to easily create, copy, move, delete, resize without losing data, backup and restore partitions. It supports various including EXT2/3/4, BTRFS NTFS, FAT16/32, XFS, and more.
6. Qtparted
In addition, you can also use Qtparted, is a Partition Magic (proprietary software for Windows) clone and Qt front-end to GNU Parted. Note that it still in development and you may likely experience any kind of problem with latest release. In that case try to use the CVS version or a previous stable version.
It may not be one of the best options now but you can give it a try. More features are yet being added to it.
You might also like to read these following related articles.
- 4 Tools to Manage EXT2, EXT3 and EXT4 Health in Linux
- 3 Useful GUI and Terminal Based Linux Disk Scanning Tools
- Recover Deleted or Lost Files in Linux
These are the best partition managers and editors available for Linux operating systems. Which tool do you use? Let us know via the comment section below. Also let us know of any other partition managers for Linux, missing in the list above.
fdisk and parted look the same to me on the ubuntu 20.04 server.
I’m looking for a CLI partition manager that, to make another partition, shows the next available start and the end values of the disk, and doesn’t make me guess what it already knows.
I see a lot of recommendations for Gparted. And it makes me wonder how much those involved used the product.
I suggest people try a resize and slide operation of a partition larger than 20GB on a range of GPT/UEFI laptops and desktops from different manufacturers. Then check it for file table errors.
Unless you are a partition mgt and multiboot Nazi, you are unlikely to know squat about this sector.
So what would you recommend if i want to resize a partition to the left (using Mint 19.2).
What exactly is your objection to GParted? You never make that clear in your post.
A few days ago i deleted my swap, moved my root to the left (ex swap area), extend the root with swap leftover, shrunk the home partition 10gb and then extended the root with that 10gb all in one go with Gparted and that worked like a charm!!
So i do like Gparted!
I would like to find a utility – CLI or GUI, it doesn’t matter – that will allow me to re-create exFAT partitions *without* having to format them for data-recovery purposes.
Parted can do this, but doesn’t support exFAT, even with the exfat packages installed.
Any ideas?
Hi Jim, I use TestDisk, it support exFAT.
QTParted on Sourceforge hasn’t been updated since 2011. Hardly “still under development”! Worse, there was no development between 2005 and 2011. What is the point to including it here?
@Cuvtixo
Many thanks for sharing this, we will cross check.
I have used fdisk, cfdisk and GParted for years. While fdisk may be more versatile, I prefer GParted because of its GUI.
@dragonmouth
Many thanks for sharing your thoughts with us.
I use fdisk and almost any tool that makes my life easier.
Fdisk, auto correct
@Nick
Thanks for the feedback.