Yesterday one of my housemate asked me if I was able to make a partition of his hard-disk.

He has a 40 Gb drive and wanted to make two partitions, one only for windows and one only for the data.

To accomplished that I just had to fire up an ubuntu live cd (It was the 7.10 version, the one that I had handy at that time) and I used gparted to do the job.

It worked like a charm.

Open a terminal and then write

sudo gparted

to start it.

We were able to resize the old partion from 38 Gb to 12 Gb, create a new one of 28 Gb and format it with the ntfs filesystem.

Oh yeah, because this friend is still using windows.

Then we boot up in windows and the system recognized the two new partitions (C: and E:) and it was happy to use them.

All this thanks to an Ubuntu Live system. And in 5 mins. 🙂