1.6 Using a Parted Boot Disk

If you want run Parted on a machine without GNU/Linux installed, or you want to resize a root or boot partition, you will need to use a boot disk.

A boot disk image is available from:

ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/parted/bootdisk/partboot.img

To actually create the boot disk, the disk image must be written to a floppy disk. In GNU/Linux, this can be done with

# dd if=partboot.img of=/dev/fd0 bs=1440k

Or use RAWRITE.EXE under DOS.

Unfortunately, the boot disk doesn't support a very wide range of hardware. If your hard disk isn't supported, then you will need to make your own boot disk. You can copy the parted binary from the parted bootdisk onto another disk, or try other boot disks, or make your own. You may find mkparted useful, which is a shell script to make custom parted boot disks. It is available at:

ftp://ftp.tux.org/pub/people/kent-robotti/mkparted

To copy parted from the boot disk onto another disk:

1. Boot from the Parted boot disk.
2. Insert another ext2-formatted floppy disk. If it isn't formated, you can create a file system with, for example:

   $ parted /dev/fd0 mklabel loop mkpartfs primary ext2 0 1.4
   

3. Mount the floppy disk, e.g.,

   $ mount -t ext2 /dev/fd0 /mnt/floppy
   

4. Copy `/sbin/parted' to the floppy, e.g.,

   $ cp /sbin/parted /mnt/floppy
   

5. Copy `/lib/*' to the floppy, e.g.,

   $ cp /lib/* /mnt/floppy
   

6. Unmount the floppy, e.g.,

   $ umount /mnt/floppy
   

7. Find a boot disk that does support your hard disk. (Hint: try looking for rescue disks from various distributions on big mirror sites)
8. Boot off your rescue disk. Mount the disk you copied Parted onto.
9. Run Parted. For example,

   # cd /mnt/floppy
   # LD_LIBRARY_PATH=. ./parted
   

Go to the first, previous, next, last section, table of contents.