GParted and ISO buner

[KB3NRY]

Hey all!

I'm new to the Linux Mint forums and pretty darn new to Linux as well. I currently have my laptop set up to triple-boot Vista Business, XP Pro, and Ubuntu. Vista has been my primary OS, but I'm getting frustrated with it, and have always wanted to get into Linux more. A friend of mine suggested Mint and from what I've seen it looks good.

My first problem though is, I've lost my Gparted CD. Now, that shouldn't be a big problem except I can't seem to get and ISO to burn to make a new copy. I've had problems with burning ISOs before. I've used BurnCDCC and more recently ImgBurn. Most of the time it looks like the ISO has burned but when I try to boot from the CD it doesn't work. Sometimes I get the message that the CD is not 'blank', yet my computer reads it as blank. Anyway, I'm running out of CDs and getting frustrated. Can someone please give me a suggestion for a freeware ISO burning program as well as a direct link (or as close as you can get) to and ISO download of Gparted (or any good partition editor [that's free]) so I can try get this done.

I am planning on reformatting my whole HD and starting over. I have a friend that can bring me a copy of GParted to church tomorrow (weather permitting), but I should be able to do this on my own. Its not like it is a difficult task. But is annoying me very much and I can't figure out what I'm doing wrong. The one Gparted ISO I burned worked 1 time, but since then I get a command line type screen and I don't know what to type. My old Gparted just went right to the program. Sometimes that CD doesn't even go to the command line screen though.

So if someone could give me a link so I know I've got a good ISO (I've tried doing the ones off the GParted site, but I want to make sure I have the right one). Maybe you can tell me the best version/release. And also if you could tell me a good ISO burning program.

I hate to start off with such a dumb question, but this is really annoying me. Sometimes I wonder if my CD/DVD burner is not working correctly, but things burn ok sometimes. Any help would be great. Thanks in advance.

EDIT: The one time I did get GParted 0.3.4-10 to boot and go to normal screen (and I'm not sure why it did it that time and every other time it went to a command line menu) I got a screen that looked like this(minus Clonezilla):

But if I ever get that again, which option do I want to go in a reformat and partition my HD?

[jerrybee]

I'd suggest you go to http://distrowatch.com/ to find the latest GParted iso. After it's downloaded, right-click on it and select "write to disk", insert a CD, and let the burn proceed. This newbie uses GParted all the time, and I love it. When you boot from the GParted CD, select the first item in the menu, and have at it (or maybe I should say let it have at your hard drive).
As for using Mint, I'll just say that I've found more helpful folks here in the forum than I've found anywhere else, and I've tried a BUNCH of distros. They've just release a User's Manual that you'll find useful, I'm sure.
You may already know this: if you wipe your hard drive clean and start all over, install Windows first then Linux.
Good luck.

[catweazle]

You did not say if you have already installed Mint. Suppose you did : I can recommend k3b to burn iso's (you do not need a KDE environment to use k3b; select k3b in synaptic and the required libraries will be installed as well). I have never had issues with burning iso with k3b (using it some 4 years now).
If you have not installed Mint yet you could use the partitioner of the Mint CD as well. (Select "manual" and to the partitioning/format that you want) I have seen a good explanation about partitioning in the daryna guide.
Do not forget to backup sensitive data.

If you use the GParted liveCD you have to select the first option in the list you show.

[KB3NRY]

Thanks for the help and advice! I actually got it to burn and work now. I ended up putting GParted on DVD and it worked fine. I got everything installed now. Including Mint. I did not have it installed before. I did know from my last triple-boot install that Windows was first, but thanks for letting me know. If I didn't know I'm sure it would've cause problems and I'd rather hear stuff I already know than miss out on info I need. Thanks for the help. I'm sure I'll have lots of questions as I get going. This should be fun though.

[newW2]

While looking around for Gparted on DistroWatch I ran across this Parted Magic. It has a nice gui interface. The short description from DistroWatch:
"Parted Magic is a 30 MB live CD/USB/PXE with its elemental purpose being to partition hard drives. Although GParted and Parted are the main programs, the CD/USB also offers other applications, such as Partition Image, TestDisk, fdisk, sfdisk, dd, ddrescue, etc."
Link:
http://distrowatch.com/table.php?distri ... artedmagic