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GParted is an incredibly powerful partition editor and does almost everything the forpay partition editors do, but it’s free. It’s still in beta—which means it’s constantly changing and it has a few bugs (that are constantly being fixed)—but I use it all of the time and love it. If you look closely at Figure 12-72, you’ll notice that it uses strange names for the partitions, such as HDA1 or HDB3. These are Linux conventions and are well documented in GParted’s Help screens. Take a little time and you’ll love GParted too.

The one downside to GParted is that it is a Linux program—because no Windows version exists, you need Linux to run it. So how do you run Linux on a Windows system without actually installing Linux on your hard drive? The answer is easy—the folks at GParted will give you the tools to burn a live CD that boots Linux so you can run GParted!

Figure 12-72 GParted in action

A live CD is a complete OS on a CD. Understand this is not an installation CD like your Windows installation disc. The OS is already installed on the CD. You boot from the live CD and the OS loads into RAM, just like the OS on your hard drive loads into RAM at boot. As the live CD boots, it recognizes your hardware and loads the proper drivers into RAM so everything works. You get everything you’d expect from an OS with one big exception: a live CD does not touch your hard drive. Of course you may run programs (such as GParted) that work on your hard drive, which makes live CDs popular with PC techs, because you can toss them into a cranky system and run utilities.

The truly intrepid might want to consider using The Ultimate Boot CD (UBCD), basically a huge pile of useful freeware utilities compiled by frustrated technician Ben Burrows, who couldn’t find a boot disk when he needed one. His Web site is www.ultimatebootcd.com. The UBCD has more than 100 different tools, all placed on a single live CD. It has all of the low-level diagnostic tools for all of the hard drive makers, four or five different partitioning tools, S.M.A.R.T. viewers, hard drive wiping utilities, and hard drive cloning tools (nice for when you want to replace a hard drive with a larger one). Little documentation is provided, however, and many of the tools require experience way beyond the scope of the CompTIA A+ exams. I will tell you that I have a copy and I use it.

Chapter Review

Questions

1. Which is the most complete list of file systems Windows 2000/XP and Windows Vista/7 can use?

A. FAT16, FAT32, NTFS

B. FAT16, FAT32, FAT64, NTFS

C. FAT16, FAT32

D. FAT16, NTFS

2. Which of the following correctly identifies the four possible entries in a file allocation table?

A. Filename, date, time, size

B. Number of the starting cluster, number of the ending cluster, number of used clusters, number of available clusters

C. An end-of-file marker, a bad-sector marker, code indicating the cluster is available, the number of the cluster where the next part of the file is stored

D. Filename, folder location, starting cluster number, ending cluster number

3. What program does Microsoft include with Windows 2000/XP and Windows Vista/7 to partition and format a drive?

A. Format

B. Disk Management console

C. Disk Administrator console

D. System Commander

4. What does NTFS use to provide security for individual files and folders?

A. Dynamic disks

B. ECC

C. Access Control List

D. MFT

5. Adam wants to create a new simple volume in some unallocated space on his hard drive, but when he right-clicks the space in Disk Management he sees only an option to create a new partition. What is the problem?

A. The drive has developed bad sectors.

B. The drive is a basic disk and not a dynamic disk.

C. The drive has less than 32 GB of unallocated space.

D. The drive is jumpered as a slave.

6. Jaime wishes to check her hard drive for errors. What tool should she use?

A. FDISK

B. Format

C. Disk Management

D. Error-checking

7. To make your files unreadable by others, what should you use?

A. Clustering