FOSS replacement for Partition Magic, Gparted 1.6 is here to save your data
Gparted 1.6 is the latest release of this graphical partition-manager tool. It natively runs on Linux, but since the best way to use it is booted off some form of live medium, that's no limitation: it can successfully edit the partitions of Windows and various other OSes as well.
Version 1.6 comes slightly under two years after the last stable release, Gparted 1.4 which we covered in March 2022. As was the case that time around, the handy Gparted Live bootable medium hasn't been updated yet, so unless you want to compile your own copy, best wait until Gparted Live 1.6 shows up on the Sourceforge downloads page, probably in the next few days.
The new release fixes a few bugs, including in the handling of ESP partitions. You may never have heard of these, especially as they're hidden by default, but all modern PCs and Macs have them – and need them, to the extent that they won't boot if the ESP is missing or damaged. The EFI System Partition is a hidden partition on your hard disk or SSD, usually formatted with FAT32, which contains the files that start up your OS, even if you only have a single copy of Windows or macOS.
Although Gparted 1.6 can handle ESPs that have no UUID, or which report it incorrectly as 0000-0000, this was a problem in previous versions. Unfortunately, as far as we can tell, Gparted 1.6 doesn't fix bug #649324 in the underlying GNU parted library. This means Gparted can't resize FAT32 volumes smaller than 256MB, which in turn meant that Pop!_OS nuked our test laptop a few years ago. In an attempt to circumvent the CADT development model, we've opened a new bug. Please feel free to add more voices.
