Warning
This tool is very powerful, a tiny error or a cat jumping on your keyboard can lead to losing all data on a partition or even to erasing the entire hard disk. For that reason, you'll see the screen above on top of the tool screen. Click on Exit if you're not sure you want to continue.
If you have more than one hard disk, you can switch to the hard disk you want to work on by selecting the correct tab (sda, sdb, sdc etc).
You can choose from many actions to adjust your hard disk to your preferences. Wiping an entire hard disk, splitting or merging partitions, resizing them or changing the filesystem, formatting or viewing what is in a partition: it is all possible. The button at the bottom is to erase the complete disk, the other buttons become visible on the right after you click on a partition.
If the selected partition is mounted, like in the example below, you cannot choose to resize, format or delete it. To be able to do that the partition must be unmounted first.
It is only possible to resize a partition on its right side
To change a partition type (change ext3 to ext4 for example) you have to delete the partition and then re-create it with the new type. The button
appears when a disk empty part is selectedYou can choose a mount point that doesn't exist, it will be created.
Selecting gives some extra available actions, like labelling the partition, as can be seen in the screenshot below.
You can start this tool from the command line, by typing drakdisk or diskdrake as root.