GParted Live is a tiny live CD image that can copy, move, and resize partitions. It can be a lifesaver – but not for i686 any more.
Version 1.70-8 was released over the weekend. It’s a live bootable ISO image containing a minimal version of Debian and the latest version of its eponymous utility, GParted 1.70, which came out at the end of January and for the first time can handle bcachefs volumes. The slight snag for a few people is that this version drops x86-32 support. It’s now 64-bit only, as is upstream Debian 13.
GParted Live is very basic but it contains some very handy essentials, and little else – click to enlarge
GParted is a handy tool that deserves to be better known, which is why in recent years we covered the release of versions 1.40 and 1.60. It was a Register must-install all the way back in 2012.
If you remember the superb PowerQuest PartitionMagic, as the Reg FOSS desk does (he reviewed version 2.0 long ago, and the result was interpreted as an April Fool’s spoof) then GParted is basically a FOSS replacement. Version 1.70 can now handle network block devices, it has experimental support for single-drive bcachefs volumes, and probing one volume of an LVM group now won’t trigger the kernel to assemble the group.
It’s helpful even for devoted Windows-only folks. For instance, this vulture has upgraded a few friends’ computers from spinning hard disk drives to SSDs using GParted. With some variations according to whether the devices are SATA, NVMe, and so on, it’s a case of attaching old and new drives at once, booting from a Linux removable medium with GParted, resizing the Windows partition on the HDD as needed, copying it to the SSD, switching the boot device, and then using a Windows installation medium to reinstall the boot loader. With a key formatted with Ventoy, the same USB thumbdrive can be both the Linux key and the Windows one.
GParted Live 1.70 is based around the latest LTS kernel release, kernel 6.12. The download is only 580 MB, so if you have a dusty old spindle of CD-R disks lying around, in theory this should fit onto one. However, the chances are this release won’t boot on any computer old enough to have shipped with a CD instead of a DVD drive. GParted Live 1.70-8 no longer has an i686 version.
That’s because GParted Live isn’t a monolithic entity. It’s built from layers of separately developed software. It’s a live bootable OS designed solely to run GParted, which itself is a Gtk-based GUI wrapper around GNU Parted, which is the tool that does partition resizing; along with some other programs for formatting new volumes, checking filesystems and so on. (KDE has its own, very similar app.)
The OS that boots and runs the GUI is based on a very cut-down version of Debian, and as we warned you back in 2023, Debian 13 no longer has an x86-32 edition. As there’s no longer an i686 version of the underlying OS then it follows that there can’t be an i686 version of GParted Live either. If you’re still using an early Atom-based netbook or something, stick with GParted Live 1.6. ®