In the following tutorial, I cover how to create a Parted Magic bootable USB flash drive from within Windows. This fully functional portable Operating System doubles as a disk management utility to help you perform disk editing, disk imaging, and partitioning tasks with ease.
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Parted Magic Bootable USB
Parted Magic Partitioning, Cloning, Backup, Recovery
Parted Magic is a commercial Linux based live USB distribution originally based on Slackware. Developed by Patrick Verner, it was designed for partitioning, cloning, backup, and recovery of hard drives and other storage devices.
The software includes several disk management tools, such as GParted, Parted, Clonezilla, TestDisk, and other utilities. These tools allow users to perform a variety of tasks, such as resizing, copying, moving, and deleting partitions, as well as creating disk images and restoring data from backups.
It is widely used by IT professionals, system administrators, and home users who need a reliable and powerful disk management solution. It is available for purchase on the authors website, and it can also be downloaded and used for free as a trial version with limited functionality. Features include:
Supported File Systems: ext2, ext3, ext4, fat16, fat32, ntfs, reiserfs, btrfs, exfat, hfs, hfs+, f2fs
Partial File System Support: jfs, Linux swap, lvm2 pv, nilfs, reiser4, ufs, xfs, zfs
Possible File System Actions: Create, Grow, Shrink, Move, Copy, Check, Label, UUID
Supported Hardware:
- Requires at least a 64-bit processor
- 8GB of RAM (2GB in Live mode)
- Compatible with Secure Boot on Windows machines
- Runs well on Intel Macs
Supported Storage Devices:
- Hard disk drives (SATA, IDE, SCSI)
- Flash memory
- USB drives
- SSD (Solid State Drives)
- Devices with sector sizes of 512, 1024, 2048, 4096, etc.
Networking:
- Uses Network Manager for setting up wired and wireless connections
- Includes the Firefox web browser for internet browsing
Additional Partition Features:
- Supports msdos or gpt partition tables
- Supports MIB partition alignment or traditional cylinder boundaries
- Allows disabling and enabling partition flags such as hidden, boot, raid, etc.
No Installation Required:
- PartedMagic is a standalone Linux operating system
- Runs from a CD or USB drive
- No installation required
Disk Partitioning Software:
- Parted Magic is equipped with tools for disk partitioning, allowing users to create, resize, move, and manage partitions on their hard drives.
SSD Secure Erase:
- Parted Magic supports Secure Erase for SSDs, marking all cells as empty.
Benchmarking Software:
- Parted Magic includes benchmarking software for testing the relative performance of a computer by running standard tests and trials.
- Useful hard disk management tools include; partition image, testdisk, fdisk, sfdisk, dd, and ddrescue.
- Functions and usage is well documented.
- Supported formats include; ext2, ext3, ext4, fat16, fat32, hfs, hfs+, jfs, linux-swap, ntfs, reiserfs, reiser4, and xfs.
Parted Magic Specifications
- Distribution Home Page: Official Site
- Developer: Patrick Verner
- Minimum Flash Drive Capacity: 2GB
- Persistent Feature: No
USB Parted Magic Linux Checklist
- Windows PC to perform the install
- i586 processor and 256MB of RAM to operate or 128MB in "Live" mode
- Fat32 formatted USB flash drive
- pmagic-X.X.iso
- YUMI
How to Make a Parted Magic Bootable USB
- Download and launch YUMI
- (1) Select your Flash Drive.
(2) Then choose Parted Magic (Partition Tools) from the list of distros.
(3) Browse to your ISO file, and then click Create.
- Once the YUMI USB Installer has finished, reboot your PC and set your BIOS or Boot menu to boot from your USB flash drive.
If all went well, you should now have a bootable Parted Magic flash drive which can be run from any PC that supports booting from an external USB device.
