Parted Magic LiveUSB
This robust and useful freeware suite will help you create a bootable USB drive containing Linux and tools to manipulate your hard drive. To properly build the bootable USB drive you’ll have to surf to the publisher’s Web site for the detailed instructions. When you’re finished, you’ll have an OS with more hard-drive-related functions and utilities than you can shake an USB stick at.
This is one of the better packages of OS and functions to manipulate hard drives. Booting into the Linux OS offers numerous commands and more functions than we could list here. From formatting to rebuilding hard drives, you’ll find very useful executables written for Linux. It’s too bad that listings and instructions are almost nonexistent without going to the publisher’s Web site. Many small functions are easy to use, but improperly set actions could result in damage to your file structure.
Before going to the trouble of building the bootable USB, we recommend taking the time to upgrade to Parted Magic version 2.2, which is also freeware. Parted Magic 2.0 uses VisParted and Parted as core drive manipulation tools. Version 2.2 includes the more popular Gparted, a robust tool with the ability to change drive partitions without losing data. Of course, you should still back up data before using either version.
Parted Magic LiveCD is a powerful, efficient OS with tools for expert users who needs to manipulate their hard drives.