Yesterday, I thought of getting the newest version of Parted Magic since the version of GParted in the version of Parted Magic that I have is 0.8.x, and the version in openSUSE 13.1 is 0.16.x.
To my frustration, Parted Magic is no longer free, as you have to pay $5 (USD) for it. Luckily, you're able to download it 9 times (equating to about 56 cents per download) before you have to pay again (there's also other price points that includes more downloads).
Luckily, I found a slightly older version being hosted somewhere on the net, and downloaded it this morning. I then burned it to a disk and first tested it out with the VAIO (would have been Ziggy, but you can read that other entry about him).
When it started up, I was greeted with a GRUB-like menu (GRUB1 not 2) that displayed a few options: the first two being the default 32 or 64 bit versions for computers with over 1GB of RAM (copies the entire live session to the RAM), the second two being the default 32 or 64 bit versions for computers with under 1GB of RAM (runs off of the disk), and then some other options I don't recall (there were language options after the first and second set of options, but I didn't think it was worth properly listing them).
I chose the first default 32-bit option and once it was doing copying to the RAM, it spat the disk out, which was a bit strange to me at first, but made sense. I tried opening up GParted, but it was taking far too long, as it might have been trying to scan the card reader (I'm not entirely sure, but I was too disheartened from Ziggy to do a proper testing).
I then tested in the Dell (64-bit this time) and everything worked just fine. It was nice to see it be quite snappy since there's no real lag reading from the RAM.
With this, it'll probably be the last update of Parted Magic I use. I'm not exactly sure why they decided to make the move to have users pay, but it certainly isn't something I'm happy with.
Also, I tried using MuliSystem Live (version r6) to put it on my Linux USB drive, but it gave me the same "This ISO is not supported at this time" message as I got with openSUSE 12.x and 13.1 ISOs. I'm going to download the latest version (Though I think another one comes out on the 14th? Could have also been something else I looked at.) tomorrow and see if that changes anything. If not, then at least I have the latest version.
I also decided to update Gparted Live at that same time as well.
Nonetheless, there's really not much to say about the new version, since not a whole lot has changed... All the text-based setup (keyboard/language/video) is still there when booting into Gparted Live, and the desktop is still pretty basic, but they do their best to make it look decent.
I tested on the VAIO (again, would have been Ziggy) before testing Parted Magic, since I downloaded the i686 version after researching that I wouldn't need the i486 version.
There was also a 64-bit version, but I didn't bother with it, since I wanted to test out Parted Magic first to see if my hypothesis about it being a "hybrid disk" was correct (and it was).
I may have to go with Gparted Live if I want an updated version of GParted, but I might also just buy Parted Magic (and save the other 8 downloads for future releases?) since it's cheap enough. We'll see what happens.
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