Reference articles on history, science, culture and more
Surprise meSurprise meSubscribe
Encyclopedia

Parted Magic

Commercial Linux distribution

Wikipedia contributorsAdapted for Fathomly · View authors
1 min read
Source updated July 2, 2026
Image credit is listed at the end of this article.

Parted Magic is a commercial Linux distribution based on Slackware that comes with disk partitioning and data recovery tools. It is sold as a Linux-based bootable disk. The distribution's nomenclature is derived from the names of the GNU Parted and PartitionMagic software packages.

01Features

The program is directly bootable from a CD, USB flash drive, or through a network using PXE on PC hardware, and does not require installation, or the presence of an installed operating system.

Although originally designed for mechanical hard disk drives, Parted Magic is suitable for use also with solid state drives and can perform an ATA Secure Erase (a method that is built into the hard drive controller to return the drive to its factory state).

Parted Magic supports reading and writing to a variety of modern file systems, including ext3, ext4, FAT, exFAT, and NTFS, and as such is able to access disk drives formatted for use under Microsoft Windows and Linux systems.

The software distribution includes networking support, and comes with the Firefox web browser.

02System requirements

As of version 11.11.11, Parted Magic supports x86-64 processors natively (32-bit x86 processors were previously supported), and requires a computer with at least a 64-bit Intel-compatible processor and 2GB of RAM. Secure Boot is also supported. x86 versions from 2013_09_26 do not require the Physical Address Extension (PAE) computer processor feature.

All versions starting from 2020_08_23 no longer support 32-bit x86 systems.

03Availability

Up to version 2013.08.01 the distribution was freely available for download from the official website and the project page on SourceForge. The distribution moved to a pay-for-download business model, despite the packaged software being free and open source.

Watch videos about Parted MagicExplainers and documentaries on YouTube (opens in a new tab)

Sources and credits

This article is adapted from the Wikipedia article “Parted Magic”, written by its contributors and licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. Fathomly has changed the layout, removed citation markers, navigation and maintenance notices, and adjusted punctuation. This adapted version is shared under the same license. For references, see the original article.

Images, from Wikimedia Commons:

Fathomly is not affiliated with or endorsed by the Wikimedia Foundation. Spotted a problem? Tell us.

Continue exploring

Related topics

SystemRescue

SystemRescue is a Linux distribution for x86-64 and IA-32 computers. The primary purpose of SystemRescue is to repair unbootable or otherwise damaged computer systems after a system crash.

GParted

GParted is a GTK front-end to GNU Parted and an official GNOME partition-editing application. GParted is used for creating, deleting, resizing, moving, checking, and copying disk partitions and their file systems.

Disk partitioning

Disk partitioning or disk slicing is the creation of one or more regions on secondary storage, so that each region can be managed separately. These regions are called partitions.