Whole disk erase: Parted Magic

IMPORTANT NOTE: Talk to your departmental IT Professional (if your department has one) or contact the IT Support Center before downloading or using Parted Magic on UD equipment. Incorrectly burning a disk image for this boot cd could irreparably damage your computer.

Parted Magic is a bootable CD that can be used as an emergency boot disc to recover data from your system if you cannot boot from your hard drive. It contains many tools for reading data, changing partition sizes, scanning for viruses, diagnosing hard drive issues and much more. Because of the power of these utilities, they should only be used by experienced and/or advanced computer users.

Because this disk runs a version of Linux, it can read data from Windows, Macintosh, and Linux systems. It can run diagnostics on a wide range of standard PC hard drives and tell you if your hard drive is experiencing problems that may lead to failure.

Parted Magic is distributed as an .iso file, which means you must first download the file and burn the disk image to a blank CD, DVD, or BD before using the software.

There is a nominal charge for Parted Magic.
 

How to burn an .iso disc image

Windows

Burn the .iso file to a blank CD, DVD, or BD

Macintosh

Use the Disk Utility to burn the .iso file to a blank CD, DVD, or BD.