Partitioning Magic: Parted Magic Version 3

The GPL-licensed partitioning distribution is capable of resizing Ext, NTFS and FAT partitions, and can partition and set up hard disks with the help of various tools. As a Linux distribution, Parted Magic also includes Firefox and support for WLAN, FTP, and SSH.

Although the user interface remains unchanged, the project claims that nearly everything has changed under the hood. This is claim is supported by the Parted Magic 3.0 Changelog. The developers point out that the distribution now uses HAL, Dbus, and X.org server version 1.4.2. Thanks to updated firmware, Udev now detects more hard disks and WLAN chips, which reduces the danger of a computer freezing at boot time. The use of the current version 2.6.26 kernel improves hardware support thanks to the long list of new drivers.

On top of this, there is a whole bunch of software updates where the developers have moved to newer versions of the tools included by the distribution. On top of this, some new software has been added. Parted Magic now supports the popular GRUB boot manager besides Lilo, including a version for USB sticks. At the same time, some components have been replaced. For example, the Thunar and Emelfm2 file managers have now been replaced by Pcmanfm and Midnight Commander.

If you are interested in downloading Parted Magic 3, you have to choose between the USB, PXE, and ISO variants. The USB version is used with USB sticks and the PXE variant can be booted over a network. The ISO download is intended for writing to a bootable CD. The archive sizes for the three flavors are 43MB each.