Questions tagged [gnome-disk-utility]

disk management and udisk frontend for GNOME Desktop and Unity. It can be found typing "Disks" in the dash/application list.

Disks, gnome-disk-utility, GNOME Disk or Palimpsest is the default disk manager included in Ubuntu Desktop and Ubuntu GNOME Desktop. It uses udisks as backend for most of the disk operations. udisks is the HAL replacement for disk management and control.

It can configure and manage mount points, format disks, create and destroy partitions, manage RAID devices, probe S.M.A.R.T. data, benchmarking, cloning, etc.

It's used in several distributions as an alternative to Gparted. It was originally developed by David Zeuthen for the Red Hat project and later on added to the GNOME Fundation toolset.

Questions using this tag should ask about the usage and capabilities of Disks in Ubuntu or it's characteristics.

The Disks introductory manual can be found it at gnome.org in HTML format. A short history about Disks can be found in the author blog, David Zeuthen.

Old releases of Disks can be found in the freedesktop.org release page: http://hal.freedesktop.org/releases/. More recent activity can be found in the git repository, in the udisks module.

87 questions
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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…
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Encrypted disk won't unlock anymore: Not authorized to perform operation (udisks-error-quark, 4)

In 2012 I used Ubuntu's gnome-disks utility to encrypt an external drive. Last year I was still being able to unlock it. But today I tried again on Ubuntu 2012.04 and gnome-disks says: Error unlocking encrypted device Not authorized to perform…
Nicolas Raoul
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How to automatically turn off hard drive when not used?

I have a noisy hard drive I rarely use and want to silent. I would like to put it in sleep mode after some time (20 sec) when it's not mounted on the system. The gnome-disks utility shows a "standby timeout" option: The hard drive never gets to…
12
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How do I open the Disk Utility in Unity?

I am new to Ubuntu and have installed it side by side with windows 7. Both boot up okay, my problem is I can't get to disk utility to create a partition that I can share between both OSs. Help says go to activities -> overview and select disk…
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How do I open Disk Utility in Xfce?

On the back of How do I open the Disk Utility in Unity?, how do you access Disk Utility in other DEs like Xfce? And what exact packages need to be installed to access this functionality?
landroni
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Why are writes on an NVME slower under Linux than under Windows?

I am using a 970 EVO 1TB NVME SSD (2500MB/s SLC-Cached (1200MB/s TLC)) and a MX300 SATA SSD in my system. After running some benchmarks I realized that the NVME SSD is not as fast as I hoped it would be. According to the gnome disk benchmark I get…
HennyKo
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Capacity of pen drive shown is less than the actual

I have a 8 GB pendrive. I used to write raw data into the pendrive (without creating filesystem) using the dd command. Today, when I inserted the pen drive, the I am unable to write anything on to it. When I open gparted it is showing the total…
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1 answer

Make a full bootable usb stick with Gnome disk utility

I want to make a usb stick bootable with multiple iso files. How can I do it via Gnome disk utility? How can I config the usb for showing grub2 before starting any of ISOs?
7
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gnome-disk-utility not showing all partitions after Ubuntu 16.04 clean-install

After a clean-install of 16.04 alongside W7 my shared partitions did not auto-mount at boot. I opened "disk" in launcher and surprisingly the partitions are not like shown in gparted (and in reality) and as a result I cannot tell the…
dr mat
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How do I format a partition to exFAT in GNOME Disks? "exFAT" is greyed out

I'm trying to use GNOME Disks to format a USB stick to exFAT. If I create a new partition, I see this dialog: If I select "Other", I am presented with these choices: As you can see, the "exFAT" radio button is greyed out and disabled. How do I…
Flimm
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How to auto mount with full permissions using gnome-disk-utility?

I have gnome-disk-utility installed. It mounts a secondary hard drive I have, but it does not do it with write or execute permissions. How do I setup gnome-disk-utility to mount a hard drive with read, write, and execute permissions? Per this…
Seph Reed
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Gnome Disk Utility - "SMART Data & Self Tests..." Option greyed out

The option for "SMART Data & Self Tests..." is not available (greyed out) in Gnome Disk Utility on 22.04. I have smartmontools installed and can read information about the disk, including test results and errors by running smartctl commands. I'm…
jumbuck
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I have an error while I try a "benchmark" on gnome disks utility

I have a problem with disks. When I try to test the velocity of my hard drive, the system show me a message that says "error unmounting /dev/sda2: target is busy (udisks-error-quark,14)", but it's only when I put the write option too. I only have…
DeiviiD
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NVME can't see S.M.A.R.T. in gnome-disk-utility

I am using Ubuntu Mate 16.04. I bought an nvme ssd (Intel 600p) and am no longer able to view SMART data through gnome-disk-utility. I was able to see SMART using my old SATA ssd through this dropdown menu: With the NVME ssd, the menu option…
Yuki
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How do I encrypt an external (USB) hard drive in 14.04?

I'm running Ubuntu 14.04 LTS and I have a Western Digital external hard drive (Passport Ultra) mounted. I want to encrypt the entire drive. WD has Windows and Mac utilities available, but nothing for Linux/Ubuntu. I have consulted Ubuntu help and…
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