It provides a GUI to manage and configure disk drives and media. It can be used to format and partition drives, mount and unmount partitions, query S.M.A.R.T. attributes.
Questions tagged [disk-utility]
103 questions
76
votes
8 answers
How do I find out if I have a swap partition on my hard drive?
I used the 12.04 live cd to install Ubuntu over my Windows 7 partition and deleted everything so I just have Ubuntu on my laptop. But since during the installer I chose the simple "erase entire disk" option, did the installer create a swap partition…
dswhite85
- 1,214
- 7
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76
votes
6 answers
How do I rename a USB drive?
How exactly would I rename a USB drive?
I've read that you can go into the Disk Utility, click on Edit Partition, and there is an option to rename the label but I can't click in the area to rename.
Is there any other way?
Muhnamana
- 1,880
53
votes
4 answers
Securely erase hard drive using the Disk Utility
I am planning on selling my laptop. So I formatted my disk using the Disk Utility and chose to overwrite the disk with zeroes.
Two questions:
Is this the same as overwriting the disk using dd?
sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda
And is this method…
Stefan van den Akker
- 1,319
34
votes
3 answers
How can I run Disk Utility in terminal via a comand line?
First of all, I must say that I have successfully used Disk Utility in the past and thus I could rename my partitions.
But yesterday, I saw that my partitions are not mounted, so I used Storage Device Manager to make them to automatically mount at…
Cristiana Nicolae
- 4,570
- 10
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- 46
21
votes
3 answers
How can I launch Disk Utility after installing it?
I'm trying to run gnome-disk-utility. But I cannot seem to find it.
sudo apt-get install gnome-disk-utility says its already installed, as does the software manager, however running gnome-disk-utility or palimpsest gets me command not found.
I have…
Peter
- 407
19
votes
5 answers
wipefs device or resource busy
I am trying to format a drive using the Ubuntu Disks utility. When I select and try to format the drive I get
Error wiping device. Command-line wipefs -a "/dev/sdb" exited with non-zero exit status 1: wipefs: error: /dev/sdb: probing…
Steve
- 323
17
votes
6 answers
How to wipe/format entire disk using gparted?
With gnome-disk-utility alias palimpsest there is an option to format entire disk with partitioning scheme "none" or something similar.
How do I do that in gparted?
(? is it the "loop" option ?)
Or does it not have that feature?
nlognfan
- 171
14
votes
1 answer
How to check what are using the mounted disk when I want to eject it
The disk is mounted by sudo mount /dev/sdd5 /media/SDD/Docs and sudo mount /dev/sdd6 /media/SDD/Images and so on, thus there are some directories corresponding to the volumes of the mounted disk.
And when I wanted to eject the disk, i.e. using sudo…
mining
- 297
13
votes
1 answer
Is this drive failure or something else?
I have a year-old drive that's giving me trouble. Copying data to it fails after about 8-10GB of transfers. It spontaneously changes to 'read only'. It's properly formatted ext4, I'm the owner. Searching online, it looks like this is a symptom of a…
Tom Brossman
- 13,297
12
votes
2 answers
how to check a filesystem in Ubuntu 16.04?
In Ubuntu 12.04 I was used to run the 'Disk Utility' and choose 'Check Filesystem'; its subtitle showed also 'and repair'. In Ubuntu 16.04 I have only found the 'Disks' utility that looks similarly but has no 'Check Filesystem' option, even for the…
Tomáš Pečený
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- 46
12
votes
8 answers
GUI program to create partition backup image no larger than its files?
I like 'Disks' (gnome-disk-utility) and its ability to create backups of system partitions.
But at some point I read on the internet about a program that would create such images that are not as large as the whole partition, but only as large as…
user47206
12
votes
1 answer
Format disk in 14.04
I remember using Disk Utility to format disks and USBs in 12.04.
Now, after upgrading to Ubuntu 14.04, I can't seem to find the Disk Utility application.
How do I format disks in 14.04?
Looking for applications that are installed by default to carry…
callmekatootie
- 453
12
votes
2 answers
Disk Image Mounter
I am on Ubuntu 12.04 and I don't find Disk Image Mounter as an option when I right click on a ISO file. Can any help me with this? Thanks!
VRU
- 1,143
9
votes
1 answer
How do I correctly align partions on a hdd with sector size of 4096 bytes?
I just bought a Lenovo x121e (E-350 version).
I was able to successfully install ubuntu 11.04 and everything is running fine (for the system to boot an efi partition seems to be necessary however).
The laptop has a Seagate Disk with a physical…
Uli
- 5,196
9
votes
2 answers
How do I get Disk Utility to read SMART data from USB drives?
When I plug in a external USB drive and want to check its S.M.A.R.T. status in Disk Utility (palimpsest) I cannot because the option is greyed out. Is there an option somewhere to enable this feature? It works fine for internal IDE/SATA drives.
I…
waspinator
- 4,942