Back in my Windows days, disk maintenance was a task that filled me with dread. I remember the endless hours spent scanning, defragmenting and scanning again. And partitioning the hard disk always held a special terror for me—I'd heard too many stories of hard drives bricked when Windows decided to reboot at a critical point in the process.

Life on Linux has been much less stressful. The modern filesystems have made endless defragging a thing of the past for me, and partitioning is much simpler too. There are many options when it comes to disk maintenance, but GParted is one of my favorites. I use it on all my machines.

GParted is a nice tool for managing disk partitions in Linux. It's very powerful, but the interface is simplicity itself. The live version is OS-independent. You can use it on most computers that can boot from a USB drive or CD—just plug the USB or CD in to the machine and reboot. Instead of loading the operating system, you get GParted, all by itself.

This is especially useful if you're trying to fix a Windows PC after one too many blue screens or if you're partitioning a hard drive before installing an OS.

Even if your computer is running smoothly, running GParted live from a USB stick or CD is the best way to access all the features. Also, you won't have to worry about permissions or other processes competing for processor resources. With less disk activity going on at the same time, there's less risk of something going horribly wrong.

The latest version of GParted Live tackles a couple issues that were causing crashes. One issue involves certain BIOSes that failed to boot the app. Another issue involved FAT32 volumes—a bug in the libparted library sometimes would cause the app to choke and die. This now has been addressed, although the developers are asking users to check that Windows recognizes the new partitions.

Another bizarre bug involved missing GUI elements when the app was run inside VirtualBox. The window bars were reported as missing, but they're back now!

The current release has been tested on multiple BIOSes, virtualization environments, and architectures. It works with NVIDIA and Intel graphics. You can download an ISO image for your target architecture. There are several options covering the most common configurations available here.