GParted Live is a tiny live CD image that can copy, move, and resize partitions. It can be a lifesaver – but not for i686 any more.

[1]Version 1.70-8 was released over the weekend. It's a live bootable ISO image containing a minimal version of Debian and the latest version of its eponymous utility, [2]GParted 1.70 , which came out at the end of January and for the first time can handle bcachefs volumes. The slight snag for a few people is that this version drops x86-32 support. It's now 64-bit only, as is upstream Debian 13.

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GParted Live is very basic but it contains some very handy essentials, and little else – click to enlarge

GParted is a handy tool that deserves to be better known, which is why in recent years we covered the [4]release of versions 1.40 and [5]1.60 . It was a [6]Register must-install all the way back in 2012.

If you remember the superb PowerQuest PartitionMagic, as the Reg FOSS desk does (he reviewed [7]version 2.0 long ago, and the result was interpreted as an April Fool's spoof) then GParted is basically a FOSS replacement. [8]Version 1.70 can now handle [9]network block devices , it has experimental support for single-drive bcachefs volumes, and probing one volume of an LVM group now won't trigger the kernel to assemble the group.

It's helpful even for devoted Windows-only folks. For instance, this vulture has upgraded a few friends' computers from spinning hard disk drives to SSDs using GParted. With some variations according to whether the devices are SATA, NVMe, and so on, it's a case of attaching old and new drives at once, booting from a Linux removable medium with GParted, resizing the Windows partition on the HDD as needed, copying it to the SSD, switching the boot device, and then using a Windows installation medium to reinstall the boot loader. With a key [10]formatted with Ventoy , the same USB thumbdrive can be both the Linux key and the Windows one.

[11]The price of software freedom is eternal politics

[12]British Perl guru Matt Trout dead at 42

[13]Red Hat sweetens the RHEL deal for biz devs – just don't put it in prod

[14]Anubis guards gates against hordes of LLM bot crawlers

GParted Live 1.70 is based around the latest LTS kernel release, [15]kernel 6.12 . The download is only 580 MB, so if you have a dusty old spindle of CD-R disks lying around, in theory this should fit onto one. However, the chances are this release won't boot on any computer old enough to have shipped with a CD instead of a DVD drive. GParted Live 1.70-8 no longer has an i686 version.

That's because GParted Live isn't a monolithic entity. It's built from layers of separately developed software. It's a live bootable OS designed solely to run [16]GParted , which itself is a Gtk-based GUI wrapper around [17]GNU Parted , which is the tool that does partition resizing; along with some other programs for formatting new volumes, checking filesystems and so on. (KDE has its own, [18]very similar app .)

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The OS that boots and runs the GUI is based on a very cut-down version of Debian, and [20]as we warned you back in 2023 , Debian 13 [21]no longer has an x86-32 edition . As there's no longer an i686 version of the underlying OS then it follows that there can't be an i686 version of GParted Live either. If you're still using an early Atom-based netbook or something, stick with GParted Live 1.6. ®

Get our [22]Tech Resources



[1] https://gparted.org/news.php?item=258

[2] https://gparted.org/news.php?item=256

[3] https://regmedia.co.uk/2025/07/14/gparted_live_1-7.jpg

[4] https://www.theregister.com/2022/03/30/gparted_14/

[5] https://www.theregister.com/2024/02/28/gparted_16_is_here/

[6] https://www.theregister.com/2012/11/20/ten_linux_apps_you_must_instal/

[7] https://www.scoug.com/OS24U/1995/scoug509.2.partmagic.html

[8] https://sourceforge.net/projects/gparted/files/gparted/gparted-1.7.0/

[9] https://docs.kernel.org/admin-guide/blockdev/nbd.html

[10] https://www.theregister.com/2021/12/10/friday_foss_fest/

[11] https://www.theregister.com/2025/07/12/the_price_of_software_freedom/

[12] https://www.theregister.com/2025/07/11/matt_trout_dies_at_42/

[13] https://www.theregister.com/2025/07/10/rhel_business_developers/

[14] https://www.theregister.com/2025/07/09/anubis_fighting_the_llm_hordes/

[15] https://www.theregister.com/2024/12/11/linux_612_lts/

[16] https://gparted.org/

[17] https://www.gnu.org/software/parted/

[18] https://apps.kde.org/en-gb/partitionmanager/

[19] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/front&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=2&c=2aHV99UiyJ454_g1pLi7GLgAAAUQ&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D2%26raptor%3Dcondor%26pos%3Dtop%26test%3D0

[20] https://www.theregister.com/2023/12/19/debian_to_drop_x86_32/

[21] https://www.debian.org/releases/////trixie/release-notes/issues.en.html#i386-reduced-support

[22] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/