Parted Magic 2026.09_4 Boot ISO (x64)

 

 

Parted Magic is a bootable Linux distribution based on Slackware, renowned for its comprehensive suite of disk management, data recovery, cloning, secure erasure, and system rescue tools, all accessible from a live environment without requiring installation or an underlying operating system.

This commercial, standalone OS—continuously updated through 2025—empowers IT professionals, system administrators, hardware technicians, and home users to perform critical operations like non-destructive partitioning, full drive imaging, benchmark testing, and forensic wiping on any compatible PC, supporting a vast array of storage devices including SATA/IDE/SCSI HDDs, SSDs, USB drives, NVMe, and RAID arrays with sector sizes from 512B to 4096B.

With Secure Boot compatibility, 64-bit x86 architecture requiring minimal 2GB RAM (8GB recommended), and broad hardware support encompassing Intel Macs, AMD/Intel CPUs, and modern GPUs, Parted Magic serves as the ultimate portable toolkit for data migration, OS reinstalls, virus scans, password resets, and hardware diagnostics, ensuring mission-critical tasks execute flawlessly even on failing systems.

Boot Process and Live Environment

Parted Magic boots directly from USB flash drives (minimum 8GB), CDs/DVDs, or via PXE network boot, presenting a GRUB2 menu with optimized options: Default 64-bit (full RAM loading for speed), Copy2RAM (entire ISO in memory for silent operation), Minimal (low-RAM fallback), and alternate graphical servers for legacy graphics. Secure Boot bypass works on Windows 11 machines, with rEFInd available for EFI troubleshooting. Post-boot, users land in a lightweight Xfce desktop adorned with intuitive icons: Partition Editor (GParted), Disk Cloning, Erase Disk, Disk Health, Virus Scanner, and System Profiler.

The environment runs entirely in RAM for zero disk writes in persistence mode, supporting save sessions for custom configs/packages. Networking via NetworkManager configures wired/wireless effortlessly, with Firefox ESR for updates/downloads. Package management—via Slackware tools—installs extras like ZFS modules or NVIDIA drivers on-the-fly.

Partitioning and Resizing with GParted

Central to Parted Magic is GParted, the premier partition editor supporting MSDOS, GPT, and advanced tables with MIB alignment or cylinder boundaries. Users resize NTFS/ext4 partitions non-destructively—growing C: drives by shrinking others or reclaiming unallocated space—without data loss, previewing operations in a visual diagram. Copy/move partitions across drives intact, including boot flags (hidden, boot, raid, lvm, swap), with queue management for multi-step safety.

File system tools format to ext2/3/4, FAT16/32, exFAT, NTFS, Btrfs, XFS, JFS, and F2FS, checking/repairing via fsck. Resize2fs expands filesystems post-partition growth; ntfsresize handles Windows volumes safely. Label/UUID edits facilitate bootloader configs, while flags toggle visibility for dual-boots.

Disk Cloning and Imaging

Cloning replicates drives sector-by-sector using Clonezilla or ddrescue: entire disks, partitions, or MBR/GPT tables to images/files, supporting compression (gzip, lzop) and remote storage (SSH, Samba, NFS). Intelligent imaging skips unused blocks via intelligent sector copying, ideal for SSD migrations. Restore images bootably, verifying integrity with hashes.

Multi-threaded cloning handles TB-scale arrays, pausing/resuming for interruptions. Bit-for-bit verification post-clone ensures fidelity, crucial for forensic or archival use.

Secure Erasure and Data Wiping

Erase Disk offers DoD 5220.22-M (3/7 passes), Gutmann 35-pass, Schneier (7 random), or PRNG single-pass wipes, optimized for SSDs with ATA Secure Erase (firmware-level reset returning to factory state). NVMe Secure Erase support handles modern drives. Wipe free space clears deleted file remnants without repartitioning.

Progress meters track sectors, with verification logs. Parallel wiping across drives maximizes throughput.

Data Recovery and Benchmarking

TestDisk/PhotoRec recover partitions/files from corrupted tables or overwritten FAT/NTFS/ext. Foremost carves media from raw images. Disk Health (smartctl) reports S.M.A.R.T. attributes—reallocated sectors, temperature, wear leveling—predicting failures. Benchmarks ( Bonnie++, fio, hdparm) measure sequential/random I/O, latency, and throughput, comparing SSDs/HDDs/RAIDs.

System Profiler inventories hardware (lsusb, lspci, dmidecode), aiding diagnostics.

Windows-Specific Rescue Tools

Virus Scanner (ClamAV) detects/removes malware from offline Windows partitions. Password Reset (chntpw) clears local admin accounts. Boot Repair fixes MBR/UEFI loaders, recreating BCD for Win10/11. NTFS-3G ensures read/write access without hibernation conflicts.

File System and Storage Versatility

Full read/write for ext3/4, FAT/exFAT, NTFS, HFS+/APFS (partial), Btrfs, XFS, with fuse-exfat for compatibility. ZFS support (latest modules) enables pools/snapshots. RAID assembler (mdadm) activates Linux arrays; dmraid for fakeRAID.

Networking and Productivity

Firefox browses/updates; rsync/SCP backs up over networks. Samba shares Windows partitions; SSH tunnels securely. Midnight Commander dual-panes files; Geany edits configs/scripts.

Performance and Hardware Compatibility

Linux 6.x kernel (2025 builds) with Mesa for AMD/Intel graphics, NVIDIA proprietary drivers. 64-bit only since 2020, Secure Boot native. Runs on Intel Macs via EFI, older PCs without PAE.

Persistence saves tweaks across boots; copy2ram silences USB thrashing.

Use Cases Across Scenarios

Tech Support: Clone failing HDDs, reset forgotten passwords, scan viruses offline.
Data Migration: Resize partitions for Windows/Linux dual-boots, clone to SSDs.
Forensics: Secure wipes pre-disposal, recover deleted evidence.
Server Admins: Benchmark NVMe, repair RAID arrays.
Home Users: Expand C: without data loss, test disk health.

Regular 2025 updates (e.g., 2025_09_18 graphics refresh) ensure relevance.

Parted Magic transcends utilities as a self-contained rescue OS, delivering partitioning prowess, cloning reliability, and diagnostic depth in a bootable package. Its hardware breadth, file system mastery, and Windows affinity make it indispensable for disk mastery—proving one USB conquers countless crises.

Disk Partitioning
PartedMagic has the tools to get the job done. With the Partition Editor you can re-size, copy, and move partitions. You can grow or shrink your C: drive. Create space for new operating systems. Attempt data rescue from lost partitions.

Data Rescue
PartedMagic allows you to easily reset or change Windows passwords. Recover lost files. Rescue files from devices with disk read errors.

Disk Cloning
Clone a computer’s entire disk or a single partition. The cloned data could be saved as an image-file or as a duplicated copy of the data. The data could then be saved to a locally attached storage device, an SSH server, a Samba Server, or a Network File System share. The clone file can then be used to restore the original when needed.

Disk Erasing
PartedMagic comes with easy to use solutions for conventional overwrite. Internal Secure Erase. Wiping of only Free Space.

Benchmarking
All the benchmarking tools you would ever need! Bonnie++, IOzone, Hard Info, System Stability Tester, mprime, and stress.

No Installation Required!
PartedMagic is a stand alone Linux operating system. Runs from a CD or USB drive. Nothing installed.

Disk Partitioning Software?
Disk partitioning divides a hard disk into multiple storage units referred to as partitions. A physical disk with multiple partitions is useful for running more than one operating system. Each Partition may use a different file system.

SSD Secure Erase?
When Parted Magic Secure Erase is issued against a SSD drive, all of its cells will be marked as empty.

Benchmarking Software?
A benchmark program tests the relative performance of computer by running a number of standard tests and trials against it.

Features:
– Format internal and external hard drives;
– Move, copy, create, delete, expansion and contraction of partitions on the hard disk;
– Cloning hard drives to create a full backup;
– Verification of hard disks and diagnostics;
– To check the memory for bad sectors;
– Benchmark your computer to assess its level of work;
– Delete all data on the hard disk without the possibility of recovery;
– Provides access to the hard disk when not zagruzayutsya systems, is saving important data;
– Boot from CD / USB memory, then can work without CD / USB;
– Supports network connections.

Parted Magic includes the following programs:
– GParted – partition editor;
– Partition Image – a tool for working with disk images;
– TestDisk – Tool for restoring boot records;
– Fdisk, sfdisk – partition table editor;
– Dosfstools – A utility for creating and verifying the integrity of the partition FAT;
– Ntfsprogs – tools for working with NTFS.
etc.

A complete list of programs

Partition Programs
– cfdisk – curses-based disk partition table manipulator
– fdisk – partition table manipulator
– fixparts – designed to correct common problems with computer partition tables
– gdisk – text-mode partitioning tool that works on GPT disks
– gpart – guess PC-type hard disk partitions
– GParted – partition editor that uses libparted
– parted – partition manipulation program
– sfdisk – partition table manipulator

File System Programs
– btrfs – btrfs is a new copy on write file system for Linux
– Bonnie + + – benchmark suite aimed at performing a number of simple tests
– curlftpfs – file system for accessing FTP hosts based on FUSE and libcurl
– dbench – file system benchmark programs
– diskdev_cmds – OSX-ported, HFS + programs supplying mkfs and fsck
– dosfstools – programs to create and check MS-DOS FAT file systems
– e2fsprogs – ext2 file system programs and libraries
– EncFS – provides an encrypted file system in user space
– fsarchiver – save contents of a file system to a compressed archive file
– FUSE – file system in userspace
– hfsplus – set of tools to access HFS + file systems
– IOzone – file system benchmark tool
– ntfs-3g/ntfsprogs – third generation NTFS driver and tools for doing neat things with NTFS
– ObexFS – FUSE based filesystem using ObexFTP
– reiserfsprogs – user-level tools for ReiserFS file systems
– sshfs – file system client based on SSH
– vmfs-tools – access VMFS through standard Linux VFS via FUSE
– xfsprogs – programs for managing XFS file systems
– zfs-fuse – a port of the ZFS file system from Sun

Booting Loader Programs
– GRUB – GRand Unified Bootloader
– HDT (Hardware Detection Tool) – Syslinux com32 hardware analyzer module
– install-mbr – installs and configures a Master Boot Record manager
– lilo – LInux LOader
– Memtest86 + – advanced memory diagnostic tool
– ms-sys – used to create Microsoft-compatible boot records
– syslinux – bootloaders for FAT12/16/32, bootable “El Torito” (iso9660), ext2/3/4 and brtfs file systems

X Programs
– Audacious – Audacious is an open source audio player
– Asunder – Asunder is a graphical Audio CD ripper and encoder
– arandr – designed to provide a simple visual front end for XRandR
– Blueman Device Manager – Blueman is a GTK + Bluetooth Manager
– ClamTk Virus Scanner – A GUI front-end for ClamAV
– Conky – lightweight system monitor
– CUPS – CUPS is the standards-based, open source printing system
– ddrescue-gui – A python script to make it easier to use ddrescue
– Evince Document Viewer – Evince is a document viewer for multiple document formats
– feh – an X11 image viewer aimed mostly at console users
– File Roller – archive manager
– Firefox – open source web browser
– galculator – GTK + scientific calculator
– GEncFS – GUI to EncFS, for encrypted directory mounting
– gtkdialog – small utility for fast and easy GUI building
– gtk-lshw – GTK + front-end for lshw
– GSmartControl – HDD health inspection tool (GUI for smartctl)
– GSSHFS – GUI to SSHFS, for distant directory over SSH mounting
– hardinfo – system profiler and benchmark
– ISO Master – GUI CD image editor
– Leafpad – GTK + based simple text editor
– lilosetup – a GUI utility to configure LILO bootloader
– Mirage Image Viewer – Mirage is a fast and simple GTK + image viewer
– netwag – a graphical front-end to netwox
– NetworkManager – Great Networking powered by DBUS
– Parcellite – Parcellite is a lightweight GTK + clipboard manager
– pyneighborhood – an OpenSource GTK + based SMB / CIFS Browsing utility
– ROX-Filer – a simple and easy to use graphical file manager for X11
– ROXTerm – ROXTerm is a terminal emulator intended to provide similar features to gnome-terminal, based on the same VTE library
– SciTE – A free source code editor for Win32 and X
– spacefm – a file manager with built-in VFS, udev-based device manager, customizable menu system, and bash integration
– systester – Test your system’s stability and performance by calculating millions of digits of Pi
– TigerVNC Viewer – a high-performance, platform-neutral implementation of VNC
– TrueCrypt – software system for on-the-fly-encrypted volumes
– UNetbootin – create bootable, Live USB drives for Linux distros without burning a CD
– WICD – A network connection manager that aims to simplify wired and wireless networking in Linux
– XChat – IRC chat program
– xclamscan – GUI for the ClamAV anti-virus
– Xdialog – designed to be a drop in replacement for the “dialog” or “cdialog” programs
– xfburn – Xfburn is a simple CD / DVD burning tool based on libburnia libraries
– Yad – (yet another dialog) is a fork of Zenity with many improvements
– Zenity – allows you to display GTK dialog boxes in commandline and shell scripts

Console Programs
– AlsaMixer – soundcard mixer for ALSA soundcard driver, with ncurses interface
– arpwatch – a tool for monitoring Address Resolution Protocol traffic on a computer network
– bar – a simple tool to copy a stream of data and print a display for the user
– BlueZ – official Linux Bluetooth protocol stack
– bzip2recover – recover data from damaged bz2 files
– cdrtools – allows recording to CD / DVD / BluRay media
– chntpw – utility to (re) set passwords of local accounts on Windows systems
– ClamAV – open source (GPL) anti-virus toolkit for UNIX
– Clonezilla – OpenSource clone system
– cmospwd – decrypts passwords stored in CMOS used to access BIOS setup
– consoleKit – ConsoleKit is a framework for defining and tracking users, login sessions, and seats
– cURL – tool for transferring files with URL syntax
– dcfldd – enhanced version of GNU dd
– dc3dd – patched version of GNU dd
– GNU dd – convert and copy a file
– ddrescue – does not abort on errors on the input file
– device-mapper – kernel component that supports LVM
– di (Disk Information Utility) – disk information programs
– diff – compares two files, showing differences line by line
– disktype – detect content format of disk or disk image
– dislocker – designed to read BitLocker encrypted partitions under Linux and Mac OSX systems
– dmidecode – reports information about your system’s hardware
– dmraid – discover and activate software (ATA) RAID
– DRBL – Diskless Remote Boot in Linux
– dvd + rw-tools – makes it possible to burn DVD images
– ELinks – text mode web browser
– ethtool – standard Linux utility for controlling network drivers and hardware
– ext3grep – recover deleted files from an ext3 or ext4 file systems
– extundelete – tool to help recover deleted files on ext3 file systems
– file – determine file type
– flashrom – identify, read, write, verify, erase flash chips
– gptsync – GPT partition table to MBR partition table synchronisation
– hdparm – get / set ATA / SATA drive parameters
– hexedit – view and edit files in hexadecimal
– hfsprescue – scans a damaged image file or partition that is formatted with HFS +
– iptables – administration tool for IPv4 packet filtering and NAT
– lftp – command-line file transfer program
– lm-sensors – Linux hardware monitoring
– lshw – Hardware Lister
– lsof – (LiSt Open Files) displays information about files open to processes
– lspci – lists PCI buses and devices in the system
– lsscsi – lists information about SCSI devices
– lsusb – lists USB devices
– lzip – gzip-like command line tool which uses LZMA compression
– md5deep – a set of programs to compute MD5, SHA-1, SHA-256, Tiger, or Whirlpool message digests on an arbitrary number of files
– mdadm – manage MD devices, aka Linux Software Raid
– Midnight Commander – file manager
– modem-manager – D-Bus service for managing modems
– multipath-tools – used to drive the Device Mapper multipathing driver
– nano – editor aimed to replace Pico
– nbd – network block device, client and server.
– nmap – programs for network discovery and security auditing
– ntp – Network Time Protocol
– Nwipe – run the DBAN dwipe command outside of DBAN
– Open-iSCSI – Open-iSCSI project is a high performance, transport independent, multi-platform implementation of RFC3720
– openSSH – encrypt sessions using the SSH protocol
– openSSL – open source implementation of the SSL and TLS protocols
– partclone – a project similar to the well-known backup utility
– partclone-utils – partclone-utils contains a utility for use with partclone generated images
– partimage – utility which saves partitions to an image file
– perl – a highly capable, feature-rich programming language
– PhotoRec – digital photo recovery
– pigz – parallel implementation of gzip that exploits multiple processors & cores
– plzip – parallel lossless data compressor based on the LZMA algorithm
– polkit – a toolkit for handling the policy that allows unprivileged processes to speak to privileged processes
– pv (pipe viewer) – monitors the progress of data through a pipeline
– pxz – a compression utility that runs LZMA compression of different parts of an input file on multiple processors simultaneously
– rdiff-backup – rdiff-backup backs up one directory to another, possibly over a network
– reglookup – direct analysis of Windows NT-based registry files
– RP-PPPoE – PPPoE client for Linux to connect to PPPoE service providers
– rsync – fast incremental file transfer
– rTorrent – text-based ncurses BitTorrent client
– safecopy – data recovery tool
– samba – the standard Windows interoperability suite of programs for Linux and Unix
– Scrounge NTFS – data recovery program for NTFS
– sdparm – outputs and modifies SCSI device parameters
– shorewall – a gateway / firewall configuration tool for GNU / Linux
– shred – securely delete a file
– smartctl – control and monitor utility for SMART disks
– stress – simple workload generator
– sudo – execute a command as another user
– TestDisk – partition scanner and disk recovery tool
– udevil – a program that mounts and unmounts devices without a password, shows device info, and monitors device changes
– udisks – a daemon that serves as an interface to system block devices, implemented via D-Bus
– UDPcast – transfer tool that can multicast data on a LAN
– unarj – program used to uncompress. arj format archives
– wpa_supplicant – implementation of an IEEE 802.11i supplicant
– wipe – secure, file wiping utility
– zenmap – the official Nmap Security Scanner GUI
– zerofree – Zerofree finds the unallocated, non-zeroed blocks in an ext2 or ext3 file-system and fills them with zeroes

Changelog:

There is a new disk cloner in this release. Wipe Free Space has been rewritten and no longer depends on an outside tool. Every other program I write has been read line by line and then run against real drives on a bench machine kept for that purpose, and the bugs that came out of it are fixed. Underneath all of that the base system has been rebuilt on Slackware-current, the desktop moved from Xfce 4.16 to Xfce 4.20, and the wallpaper changed for the first time in over ten years.

The release is named differently too, and it is signed. Both are explained at the end.

Clone

Parted Magic Clone is new. It copies a disk, a partition, or an image of either, and it produces evidence that the copy is right.

The rule it is built around is that the source is never written. Not one byte, no matter what. The source is opened read-only, and every corrective action, whether that is filling in a later slice, repairing a filesystem, growing it to fill a larger disk or repointing a boot loader, happens to the copy, after the copy has been read back and verified.

It is not a rescue tool and does not pretend to be one. Reads that keep failing mean the drive is a rescue job. Clone says so and stops, rather than degrading into a poor imitation of ddrescue.

Clone reads the allocation state out of the filesystem itself: FAT12/16/32, exFAT and NTFS cluster maps, ext2/3/4 block bitmaps, XFS, and the partition table with its logical chain. Every map is proven against that filesystem’s own counters before it is trusted. A map that disagrees by a single block is thrown away and the region is copied in full instead, with the reason printed in the plan. btrfs is always copied whole, deliberately: two different maps for it were proven wrong in the field.

Free space inside a filesystem is not copied. Neither is unpartitioned space, beyond what has to be. The table, the first 64 MiB ahead of the first partition where boot loaders live, gaps up to 16 MiB, the last megabyte of the disk and any partition Clone does not recognize are all copied verbatim. Larger gaps are skipped, and both the plan and the certificate state how much was skipped. When byte-for-byte is what you want, --full-range, or the “copy every byte” box in the window, gives you that.

That is Clonezilla’s rule, and it matters more than it sounds. On my own test disks, 198 of the 235 GiB being moved for one image was unpartitioned space. The same job now moves 37.94 GiB.

Images are raw. The bytes of the device exactly as they are, sparse where nothing was copied. No header, no container, no version number, nothing that will ever need converting. Compression is on by default and changes none of that: a compressed image is an ordinary zstd file, and zstdcat name.img.zst | dd of=/dev/sdX restores it on any machine with that machine’s own tools. On FAT32, where a file cannot reach 4 GiB, the image is written in numbered parts, each one a valid source on its own.

Reading a compressed image used to mean decompressing it. The frame table lives in the certificate beside the image, and if that certificate had been lost the table was rebuilt by one pass over the whole file. On a 235 GiB image that was 22 minutes, and the free space to hold the result, in order to produce a listing. The table now also rides inside the image, in a frame that zstdcat ignores, written as soon as the copy finishes. Images made by older versions still read the old way.

Chunks that nothing lands in are no longer built, hashed or compressed, and the read-back takes the known digest for them instead of reading them again. With the gap rule above, one image job on the bench went from 1,972 seconds to 965, and its verification pass from 943 seconds to 15.

Onto a smaller disk the table is regenerated, the largest shrinkable partition gives up the difference, and on GPT the partitions after it move inward. Onto a bigger one the largest growable partition takes the difference and the rest move out of its way. FAT, exFAT, NTFS and ext filesystems are shrunk or grown in flight: the whole transformation is computed against the read-only source and the already-resized filesystem is streamed to the destination. A dirty or damaged volume is refused in words rather than attempted.

The journal is built to survive a power cut on the boot stick. Every file is sized once and written in place, the log is append-only and fsynced, and the digest goes down before the data it describes. resume picks the job up where it stopped.

Where a sector will not read, Clone salvages around it, and the damage report names what each zero-filled range landed in, by file and by directory. You are told what you lost, not just how many bytes.

Verification is not optional. Every job ends with a read-back and a sealed certificate carrying both devices’ identities, per-chunk digests, a Merkle root, the map of anything unreadable and the timings. verify proves a certificate intact at any time; verify --deep re-reads the media behind it. Certificates can be sent to the PM Report Server.

There is one engine behind three faces: a GTK window that reads as VisParted’s sibling, a full-screen terminal interface for a machine with no graphics, and a command line with probe, plan, clone, apply, resume, verify, damage and report. All three show the engine’s own words. None of them has its own private wording for what happened.

Before release it was driven through all three faces against five real drives: nine partition copies, a whole disk to a compressed image and back onto a larger disk twice, a larger disk onto a smaller one with 194 GiB of gaps closed and fifteen partitions moved inward, an interrupt and resume, image sources and destinations, split sets, saved plans, and read-error salvage through a deliberately broken sector range. Every copy came back fsck-clean, every file comparison was identical, and every verify --deep passed. Twenty-three certificates were countersigned by the report server. Fifteen bugs were found during that run and fixed before this release.

Erase

Erase works by issuing the drive’s own hardware erase command rather than overwriting from software, so remapped sectors and areas the operating system cannot reach are covered too. It picks from nine paths per drive, automatically: ATA Sanitize, ATA Secure Erase and Enhanced Secure Erase, NVMe Sanitize and NVMe Format, SCSI Sanitize and SCSI Format Unit, eMMC/SD hardware erase, and a software block wipe where a drive has none of them. Where a drive advertises more than one variant you can pick which one is issued, because the final state of the media differs between them.

Every log and every certificate now carries a Verification Result line: how many bytes were actually read back off the medium, how the samples were spread across it, which check was applied, what anomalies were found, how long it took and at what rate. The certificate is still one page.

The rest of the changes came out of the bench.

The boot stick could be offered for erasure. After a copy-to-RAM boot the medium is unmounted, and the check that protects it only knew about mounts and swap, so the stick you booted from was invisible to it. It is now identified from the device the system actually booted from.

The certificate’s note about a Host Protected Area described the kernel’s view of the drive from before the erase started, not what the verification had covered. It now states the drive’s native sector count and what the read-back actually reached.

The identity in the log header came from dmidecode at the time the log was written. One of my test machines corrupts a byte of its own SMBIOS manufacturer string after a suspend, which meant a certificate could carry a mangled machine name. Erase now takes that from the copy the kernel made at boot.

An empty card reader was offered as a zero-byte wipe target. A completed normal run left its result files behind, so the next launch reported the previous one as having ended abnormally. The terminal interface lost its drive selection when a drive was frozen at startup.

The read-back guard after a firmware Secure Erase is unchanged and still shipping. It samples the media after the drive’s firmware reports success and fails the drive if recognizable data survived. It applies to hard disks only; SSDs are excluded deliberately, because a crypto-erase legitimately leaves non-uniform ciphertext behind and there is nothing wrong with that.

Five full erase runs were done across SSD, NVMe and spinning disks, each by that drive’s own native method, including a 6 hour 28 minute Secure Erase on a drive with 3,975 reallocated sectors followed by a 6 hour 15 minute verification. A 4 TB SAS drive took 12 hours 43 minutes for a Format Unit and 45 minutes to verify. Every run ended in a signed certificate.

VisParted

The partition editor. Twelve changes, nearly all of them bugs found by using it on real disks.

--resize --size max used to mean something ambiguous. It now means the largest size the partition can reach where it sits. Asking for more than that is refused and names --expand, which is the verb that relocates neighbors to make room. The dialogs show both figures so the difference is in front of you.

An NTFS volume could only be resized once per Windows boot. VisParted’s own resize sets the volume’s dirty flag, and the next plan then refused to touch it while naming a cure that cannot clear that flag.

A grow that fit inside the partition’s own gap moved the next partition anyway. Relocate-end produced an overlapping layout when the end of the disk was occupied. A newly created extended container lost its EBR to the ghost wipe, after which the reader blocked every plan on that disk. Format could run before the new partition’s device node existed. resume could not find a journal in a directory the operator had chosen, and it wrote before checking that the disk had not changed since the interruption. --set-type refused the linux and windows aliases that --type already accepted.

It was tested across all five bench drives: every filesystem it creates, the native FAT16, FAT32 and exFAT resizers in both directions with seeded data, tool resizes, overlapping moves, same-disk and cross-disk copies, shred, delete, GPT to MBR and back with logical partitions, spec mode, resume from every state, and the same work again through the terminal interface and the window. Every data check passed.

Wipe Free Space

Rewritten. The old version was a window around an outside program. It did one filesystem per run and broke the ext3/ext4 journal every time, which then had to be repaired afterwards. Version 2.0 has its own engine and no longer uses that program at all.

The promise this tool exists to keep is a narrow one. You delete your files, then you sell the computer, and what you deleted cannot be brought back, while the machine still boots. The Recycle Bin is your business, not mine.

It fills the free space through the mounted volume with zeros or random data, one to three passes, and then runs a small-file phase that reaches the gaps between your existing files, which a plain fill cannot get into. On SSDs it runs fstrim afterwards. Then, per filesystem: NTFS gets its unused MFT records, directory indexes, $LogFile, file tails and page file wiped with ntfswipe; ext3 and ext4 have their journal set aside before the fill and re-created after, with a directory optimization pass; FAT and exFAT have deleted directory slots overwritten with dummy entries, so the names go too. XFS and btrfs get free space and TRIM only, and the results screen says plainly that file names may remain on them.

There is a headless --auto DEVICE mode for scripting, and the four-step wizard is otherwise unchanged.

It was tested on twelve 8 GiB volumes, NTFS, ext4, btrfs, XFS, FAT32 and exFAT on both an SSD and a hard disk, each seeded with 30 files kept and 30 files deleted, then searched raw. Deleted file contents went from 30 found to 0 on every filesystem. Deleted file names were gone on NTFS, ext4, FAT and exFAT. ntfsundelete and extundelete recover nothing. Kept files were intact, journals were back, and nothing was left mounted.

One trap is worth naming, because it had been quietly defeating the old version. ext4 holds back a reserve that even root cannot write into. After a fill that reported itself complete, 29 of 30 deleted files were still sitting readable in the gaps between the kept ones. That reserve is now released for the duration of the fill and restored afterwards. XFS has the same arrangement and is handled the same way.

Wipe Free Space needs ntfswipe, so this release also carries a rebuilt ntfs-3g that includes it.

Disk Verifier

The read-only checker that proves a drive reads back as all zeros, all ones, or simply readable. It is what the erase menu offers after an erase.

Sectors hidden behind a Host Protected Area or a Device Configuration Overlay passed silently. The verifier reported a clean drive while never having seen part of it. It now notes the hidden region in the log and fails the drive with a “hidden” result and the count of sectors it could not reach.

--auto crashed without an X display, which made it useless for the scripting it existed for. There is now a headless mode with progress on the terminal and Ctrl-C as Cancel, sharing the same scan engine as the window.

An empty card reader was offered as a zero-byte disk. The boot medium now carries a badge. Step 3 has Select All and Clear. Reads no longer push everything else out of the page cache.

Drive Grader

The grading policy was not changed. What changed is that several of the numbers it was grading on were wrong, and each one of them moved a grade.

SSD wear was picked by SMART attribute ID alone, so a WD Green was being graded on attribute 233, its count of NAND gigabytes written, instead of its actual wear indicator at 230. The ID list is now a preference order, and an attribute only counts as wear if the drive database describes it as wear, life or endurance.

SMART 188 was read as a packed raw value. A Seagate reporting two command timeouts came through as 4,295,032,834 and graded F. Only the low 16 bits are read now. Power-on hours had the same problem, which is how one drive came to report 2.5 trillion hours.

A drive’s own SMART self-assessment was ignored entirely. A drive that says FAILED in as many words could still be graded on its attributes alone. That verdict is now the first row of the report.

SAS and SCSI drives graded “?” in every column. There is now a SCSI path reading health status, grown defects and uncorrected read and write errors, confirmed against a real 4 TB SAS drive. Surface-scan counts are in 4 KiB blocks and now say so.

ATA Security Disable

This is the recovery tool for an interrupted Secure Erase, which leaves the drive with a password set on it.

A drive that had been locked came back at 0 bytes after being unlocked. The rescan re-reads the kernel’s cached identify data, which still described the locked drive, so the size never updated. The tool now deletes the SCSI device and rescans its host when the size is still zero, and reports what the kernel is saying.

A refused password showed hdparm’s raw SG_IO sense bytes. It is now translated into words: the password was not accepted, or the retry counter has expired. The log header comes from the kernel’s copy of the machine identity for the same reason as Erase. The manual and the on-screen help for a frozen drive now cover the drive-password prompt some BIOSes show at power-on.

It was tested on a real drive taken through the whole sequence: password set, locked, retry lockout, security level maximum with a master password, and then recovered.

PSID Unlocker

This one is a finding rather than a fix, and it is worth reading if you rely on PSID revert.

A PSID revert does not necessarily erase your data. On a self-encrypting drive that was never taken into ownership, which is the normal state of most drives people are holding, the revert can report revertTper completed successfully and leave the partition table, the filesystem and every file exactly where they were. I reproduced this on a Samsung 980: a GPT, an ext4 filesystem and 636 files all survived. Only with the Locking SP active did the revert regenerate the key.

The tool now samples the media before and after the revert, and when the data survived it says so: “Reverted — data NOT erased”, in amber, in a banner and in the log, and it points you at the Erase suite. Success is confirmed by querying the drive afterwards rather than by trusting the command’s exit status, and the kernel’s cached partition table is flushed and re-read. The manual has a new section titled with the question directly.

Mount and File Manager

Thirteen fixes across the mount window and the file manager, most of them around encrypted and LVM volumes.

LUKS and BitLocker volumes offered Mount, which failed with “unknown filesystem type”, and an unlocked volume then disappeared from the list. Those cards now have locked, unlocked and mounted states, with Unlock, Mount, Lock and Unmount-and-lock as appropriate. Unlock LUKS found nothing at all, because the background daemon had already written every LUKS partition into fstab and the dialog was excluding fstab devices.

LVM logical volumes were never listed. Neither were whole-disk filesystems: a drive formatted with no partition table at all, the way most USB sticks and camera cards arrive. Mounts that fstab did not know about had no card at all. All three are listed now.

A wiped partition kept its old fstab entry indefinitely. A previous entry is now kept only while the device cannot be read.

The live boot medium could be unmounted or ejected. It is marked as the boot medium and protected. Erase and Clone were missing from the guard that stops a volume being mounted out from under a running disk tool.

In the file manager, the sidebar showed fstab only and now reads actual mounts as well. A LUKS row ran mount on the encrypted device; it carries a lock icon now and opens the unlock dialog. Copying a file larger than 4 GB onto FAT32 returned “[Errno 27] File too large” with no explanation, and now gets one.

The wallpaper

The desktop wallpaper has changed for the first time in over ten years.

The old one was built for 1920×1200 screens: a two-tone blue split with a damask pattern down the right side, a line-art circuit board, and the logo with the “partition | clone | rescue” tagline beneath it.

The new one is 3840×2160 and much quieter. A deep navy field, light coming across the lower left, faint circuit traces at the edges, and a large, softly drawn disc platter in the upper right. The gold corners are still there. The wordmark sits along the bottom center, where a desktop full of icons will not sit on top of it. It scales down to 1080p cleanly.

The base system

Parted Magic is no longer built on Slackware 15.0. It is built on Slackware-current, and everything underneath moved at once. The package count went from 992 to 1082.

	previous release	26.09
glibc	2.42	2.44
Python	3.9.25	3.12.14
OpenSSL	1.1.1	3.5.8
Xorg server	1.20.14	21.1.24
Xwayland	21.1.4	24.1.13
Mesa	26.1.8	26.2.2
GTK 3	3.24.31	3.24.52
GLib	2.70.3	2.90.0
Pango / HarfBuzz	1.48.11 / 3.2.0	1.58.2 / 14.4.0
fontconfig / FreeType	2.13.92 / 2.13.3	2.18.3 / 2.14.3

Parted Magic 26.09_1

• USB installer: The installer from 26.09 could not recognize the _1 point-release suffix and reported: “expected exactly one pmagic/pmodules/PMAGIC_*.SQFS, found 0.” The installer from the new ISO must be used instead.
• Clone: Network shares mounted through Samba or NFS are now correctly recognized as remote storage and can be used for images, journals, and saved plans.
• Clone: ext2, ext3, ext4, and Btrfs partitions can now be copied between 512-byte-sector and 4K-native drives. NTFS, FAT, exFAT, XFS, and whole-disk copies across that boundary remain unsupported.
• Mount: Fixed a freeze when retrying a Samba share after entering an incorrect password.
• Servers without video: X now uses the modesetting driver for Matrox G200 and ASPEED BMC graphics, preventing display failure during handover. Older Matrox cards are unaffected.
• Serial console: Added a Failsafe entry, “Serial console – no video needed,” providing a login on the first serial port at 115200 baud.
• Btrfs Assistant: Added support for subvolumes, snapshots, balance, scrub, Snapper integration, browsing and restoring files from snapshots, and rolling subvolumes back to snapshots.
• Removed: “Force vesa workaround” and “Force refresh rate” were removed from the Failsafe menus because their required file was not included in the image.

Parted Magic 26.09_2

• Erase: Operational/Damaged status is now independent of SMART health status.
• Erase: Added --technician-title support for certificates.
• Erase: Certificate timestamps now include their UTC offset.
• Erase: Log hashes now use SHA-256 instead of MD5.
• Erase: Requesting an unsupported sanitize method now reports that the drive does not advertise it, rather than silently selecting another method.
• Boot sector repair: Fixed repair on GPT disks. NTFS, exFAT, and FAT32 partitions can now be recovered from their backup boot sectors.
• ddrescue: Prevented recovery to the same disk containing the source partition or image file. The boot medium is also no longer offered as a destination.
• Package Manager: Corrected the repository from Slackware 15.0 to Slackware-current, and protected Parted Magic packages from replacement by stock packages.
• Virus scanner: Quarantine now asks for confirmation and identifies where quarantined files will be stored, preventing files in the RAM-based quarantine directory from unexpectedly disappearing after reboot.

Parted Magic 26.09_3

• Secure Erase: Verification mismatches are now reported as Erase Incomplete instead of Erase Failed.
• Secure Erase: Certificates no longer claim Purge when sanitization did not complete and identify where surviving data remains.
• Secure Erase: If a drive refuses its hardware erase command, it is overwritten instead, with the certificate honestly recording the result as Clear rather than Purge.
• Secure Erase: Unresponsive drives can be dropped from a batch while the remaining drives continue processing and receive their logs and certificates.
• Secure Erase: SCSI Sanitize operations that never report completion no longer wait indefinitely.
• Secure Erase: The drive-selection window no longer grows beyond the screen when many drives are selected.
• Secure Erase: The program now checks whether the BIOS has blocked security commands and warns the user before starting.
• Reporting: If the PM Report Server is unreachable, evidence is retained locally; erase --report-sync can send it when the server becomes available.
• Clone and VisParted: Both now share one report-server setting. Clone’s graphical and terminal versions can correctly configure it.
• VLC: Rebuilt to allow execution as root, restoring video playback for checking recovered files.
• Updated packages: 68 Slackware-current packages were updated, including Firefox 153.3.0esr, Mesa, FFmpeg, and glibc.

Parted Magic 26.09_4

• ThinkPad Secure Erase: Erase can now handle self-encrypting drives in many Lenovo ThinkPads without changing a BIOS setting, locating the PSID, removing the drive, or using another computer.
• TCG Opal: When supported, Erase resets the drive’s encryption key and records the operation as TCG Opal Cryptographic Erase, a NIST Purge. The behavior can be disabled with --no-tcg-revert.
• Host Protected Area: Drives with an HPA are erased directly, including their hidden sectors.
• Locked drives: Drives left locked after an interrupted erase can be listed and erased without a separate unlock step. Locked self-encrypting drives first try the same password before requesting the PSID.
• Verification: Block erasure verification now accepts both zero-filled and 0xFF-filled erased states.
• Sanitize: Operations that are still progressing are allowed to continue regardless of duration.
• Partition tables: Erase clears partition tables remaining at either end of a drive after firmware erasure.
• SCSI Format Unit: Progress is now displayed.
• Timing: Durations and speeds remain accurate if the system clock changes during an operation.
• Results and certificates: Results identify the actual erase method. Successful erases are shown without unnecessary notes, incomplete erases are certified as Not completed, and each drive receives its own CSV log.
• Unattended mode: Can operate without a report server, keeps evidence on the local machine, stays powered on when running from RAM, and wakes frozen drives with a short sleep.
• Copy-to-RAM boot: A drive connected after boot is no longer incorrectly identified as the boot stick.
• Disk Verifier: Drives with an HPA now pass verification, with the number of hidden sectors reported.
• Updated packages: TigerVNC was updated to 1.16.2 from 1.12.0, and the CPU-frequency panel plugin was updated to 1.2.9.

 

 

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