linHDD is a software tool designed to manage and optimize hard drives.
The initial release of LinHDD deals with ide hard drives only, as the developer has not had the opportunity to test scsi/sata drives. In case the developer cannot test the software, he cannot, in good conscience, write it.
LinHDD is designed for safety and sanity, and it will not allow any partitioning on a mounted Hard Drive, nor will it allow formatting on a mounted partition. Also, any partitioning or formatting must be done as root.
LinHDD acts as a frontend for some basic Linux tools, which should all be on your machine already. For instance, hdparm gives the detailed drive information shown in the large textbox. Additionally, it enables testing of the HDD read speed in MB/s. On the other hand, df (which lists mounted devices), mkfs and its relatives support formatting (ext2, ext3, reiserfs, xfs, jfs -- if they are supported on your machine.) And cfdisk pops up if you choose to partition a drive.
To use LinHDD, you need GTK+2-2.6, Python-2.4, pyGTK-2.6, and Pango.
The latest version of LinHDD comes with several exciting features. For instance, besides IDE drives, this version now supports use with SATA drives and USB sticks, formatting the latter to vfat (FAT32) if desired. A modified version of fdisk (abs_fdisk) is now used for finding drive information. This version runs as a normal user (not just root) but is not able to write any changes to the disk. It does not change your installed version of fdisk.
Lastly, source modifications are included in the downloads if wanted, but the compiled abs_fdisk will likely work on most newer distributions. In summary, LinHDD is an excellent and reliable hard drive utility that provides users with a convenient and user-friendly GUI for basic Linux drive utilities.
Version 0.4: N/A