1. Managing your Hard Drive Partitions with DiskDrake
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1. 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, DVD/CD, etc.

  2. Save your current partition table (the table describing the partitions held on your hard drive(s)) to a floppy disk (see Section 1.2, “DiskDrake's action buttons”).

1.1. The Interface

Figure 6.1. DiskDrake's Main Window

DiskDrake's Main Window

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. If you only have one IDE disk, you will see a single tab called hda below the file-system types. If there is more than one drive, then each drive will have its own tab and will be named according to the Linux name for that drive.

The window (see Figure 6.1, “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.

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

  • Right. A description of the selected partition.

  • Bottom. Buttons for executing general actions. See Section 1.2, “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.

1.2. 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:

Save partition table. Allows you to save the current partition table to a file on a disk (a floppy, for example). This may prove useful if a problem arises (such as an error made during drive repartitioning).

Restore partition table. Allows you to restore the partition table as previously saved with Save partition table. Restoring a partition table may recover your data as long as you do not reformat partitions, because the formatting process overwrites all your data.

Rescue partition table. If you lose your partition table and have no backup, this function scans your hard drive to try and reconstruct the partition table.

Help

Display this documentation in a browser window.

Undo

Cancels last action. Most modifications made to your partitions are not made permanent until DiskDrake warns you it will write the partition table. This button therefore allows you to undo all of your modifications on partitions up to last write.

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.

Done

Saves your changes and exits DiskDrake.

1.3. Resizing an Old Partition and Creating a New One

Abstract

In this section, we are going to do a little exercise to demonstrate one of the more useful features of DiskDrake. Let us imagine that you decide to use your machine as an FTP server and you want to create a separate /var/ftp partition in order to host the FTP files. Note that doing this step-by-step tutorial will actually modify the structure of your hard drive.

  1. Reboot the machine and choose Menu → Console Login at the login screen.

  2. Login as root and run the command: xinit diskdrake

  3. This is what the current /home partition looks like before modification. We are going to shrink this partition in order to create free space for the new file system.

    First of all, you need to unmount the /home partition by clicking on it and then pressing the Unmount button.

  4. The next step, as you may have guessed, is to click on the Resize button. A dialog appears which allows you to choose the new size for the /home partition. Move the slider to reflect the new size, then click on OK.

  5. When this is done, you will notice that the graphic representation of your hard drive has changed. The /home partition is smaller, and an empty space appears on the right. Click on the empty space and then on the Create button which appears. A dialog will let you choose the parameters for the new partition. Set the size, choose the file system you want to use (usually Journalized FS: ext3) and then enter the mount point for the partition, which in our example will be /var/ftp.

    This is how our projected partition table now looks like.

  6. The last step is to format (prepare to host files) the newly created partition. To format the partition, click on its representation in the partitions picture, then on the Format button. Confirm the writing of the partition table to disk, the formatting of the partition and the update to the /etc/fstab file. You may be asked to reboot the computer to make changes effective.

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