Alternatives to Parted Magic
A bootable disk utility for partitioning, cloning, rescuing, benchmarking and securely erasing drives from a USB stick. The listings below can replace it for an important use case. Each note says what changes if you switch.
The original
Parted Magic
A bootable disk utility for partitioning, cloning, rescuing, benchmarking and securely erasing drives from a USB stick.
Replacements
Listings that take over the same core job as Parted Magic.
GParted
The partition editor for Linux, usually run from its own live USB so it can resize the disk it is not booted from.
GParted is a free GPL-2.0 live ISO for resizing, moving and checking partitions that doubles as a rescue disk, but it has no NIST secure erase or cloning suite.
Hiren's BootCD PE
Bootable Windows PE rescue environment full of diagnostic and repair tools.
Hiren's BootCD PE is a free Windows PE boot image covering partitioning, imaging, recovery and hardware testing, though you must supply Windows components and tools lag.
Paragon Hard Disk Manager
Commercial suite for partitioning, backup, migration and secure wiping.
Paragon Hard Disk Manager is a paid Windows suite for partitioning, imaging, migration and wiping that builds its own bootable recovery medium from within the application.
ShredOS
A small bootable environment for 64-bit PCs that securely wipes disks using nwipe.
ShredOS is a free open-source boot environment that only wipes disks with nwipe on 64-bit x86 machines, without partitioning, cloning or rescue tools.
Also worth comparing
These listings name Parted Magic as their own alternative, so the relationship runs both ways.
SpinRite
A bootable maintenance and data recovery utility for hard drives and other mass-storage devices, from GRC.
Parted Magic also boots from USB or DVD and adds partitioning, cloning, benchmarking and secure erase, but it requires a paid subscription rather than a one-off purchase.
Similar software
Related functionality, not a direct replacement.
nwipe
Erase block devices from a Linux terminal or text interface.
TestDisk & PhotoRec
Recovers lost partitions, makes non-booting disks bootable again, and undeletes files from FAT, exFAT, NTFS and ext filesystems.
GNU ddrescue
A command-line data recovery tool that copies raw blocks from failing disks while working around read errors.
HDClone
Disk cloning and migration tool that boots from its own medium.
Easy2Boot
A free multiboot USB kit that boots many ISO, IMG and VHD files from one drive.
Ventoy
Prepare a USB stick once, then boot any ISO by copying the file onto it.
