GParted Interface

To open GParted , go to Activities in Ubuntu and click on the gparted icon. It will prompt for password as GParted requires sudo privileges. 

The above image shows the GParted menu, like many programs, it has a file menu(GParted), edit menu, view menu, device & partition menu, and help menu. The icons below the menu bar represent the common operations performed by gparted

• new  – create a new partition
• delete – delete an existing partition
• resize/move – to resize a partition, either shrink(or)increase the size
• copy/paste – used to copy/paste the text(or) information
• undo – undo the previous action
• apply – to perform the operation chosen from above, you have to click the apply icon to commit any selected operation in gparted

You can see all the partitions on my hard disk. It has a total of 7 partitions from /dev/sda[1-4] being used for Microsoft Windows and /dev/sda[5-7] being used by my Linux Distro. The lock icon between partition and name shows that these partitions can’t be modified while running. The partitions can be modified by using a Live CD (or) using another OS which doesn’t use these partitions.

 GParted clearly shows us

• Partition – the logical partition id in the partition table
• Name – name of the partition
• File System – type of the file system used by the partition which are like ntfs, fat32, ext4, linux-swap and more.
• Mount point – the point where the partition is being mounted by the OS which is similar to root(/), home(/home)
• Size(Used/Unused) – the size of the partition and used and free space in the partition
• Flags – It tells what the partition is being used for, which are like hidden partition, swap partition, windows partition

Disk Partitioning is a process of separating disks into one (or) more logical areas so that user and system work on them independently. When a partition is created, the disk will store the information about the location and size of partitions in the partition table. With the partition table, each partition can appear on the operating system as a logical disk, and users can read and write data on those disks. Learn more about Disk Partitioning in Linux