August 19, 2026

The PM Report Server now has a full GUI with history. Please download pmagic_2026_06_04_17.iso from your account. The report server is in the root (top level) of the ISO image.

August 18, 2026

The PM Report Server

Every Parted Magic license includes the PM Report Server, and most people who own it have never run it. If you erase more than the occasional drive, it is probably the most useful thing in the download.

Parted Magic runs entirely in RAM. That is what makes it safe — it never touches the installed system — but it also means the logs and certificates from an erase live in memory until you deliberately save them somewhere. Save them to the wrong drive, hit a power cut, or simply forget on the last machine of a long day, and the record is gone. The drive is still erased. The proof isn’t.

The report server fixes that by getting the evidence off the machine while the erase is still running, rather than after it. Copy the single file pmagic_report_server from the root of the ISO to any always-on computer with Python 3 — Linux, Windows or Mac — and start it. Nothing to install, no dependencies, no database. Then put that machine’s address in the Report Server field before you start an erase, and every drive reports to it automatically.

What you get is a dashboard on your own network showing every session you have ever run: which machine, which drives, which method, pass or fail, updating live as drives finish. Every log and every certificate is there to download. There is a CSV of every drive across every session, which is usually the fastest way to answer “prove you erased that serial number” months after the fact. And any session exports as a signed evidence pack your customer can verify offline, with no account and no vendor involved.

It runs on your hardware, on your network. Nothing is sent to us, and nothing stops working if you stop dealing with us. You can watch a bench of machines from your phone while they run.

If you erase drives for other people, this is the part that turns a wiped disk into something you can hand an auditor. Details are on the Secure Erase page, and a real evidence pack, with the verifier, is published at partedmagic.com/verify so you can check one yourself before setting anything up.

August 11, 2026

Parted Magic Erase Monitor is now on Google Play. It is a free companion app for the PM Report Server: point it at the server address you already gave the Erase utility and every session on the bench shows up on your phone while it runs, including drives that fail. It talks to your own server on your own network and to nothing else — the Play data-safety entry reads no data collected and no data shared.

Parted Magic Erase Monitor on Google Play

June 19, 2026

Parted Magic’s store now supports the EU right of withdrawal function.

Parted Magic 2026_06_04

This release rolls up fixes for all the new apps and adds a few features. Those app fixes first shipped in the _23 revision of the 2026_03_20 release.

The features worth calling out in the 2026_06_04 release are the NVIDIA open driver and automatic Live mode detection. If you’re low on RAM and select the “Default to RAM” option, the system now switches to Live mode on its own so it can still boot. It also detects which NVIDIA driver is the best fit for your machine. I think most people can just pick the default option now and end up with a working setup.

If you haven’t updated Parted Magic in a while, you’ll be pleasantly surprised by what you find.

The Erase program is completely new. It replaces the four separate programs — Secure Erase, ATA Sanitize, NVMe Secure Erase and NVMe Sanitize — with one program that identifies each drive and selects the correct method itself. It handles ATA, NVMe, SAS/SCSI and eMMC/SD, follows NIST SP 800-88r2 (September 2025), and conforms to IEEE 2883 for technology-specific techniques.

The part worth your attention is the evidence. Every erased drive now produces a signed PDF certificate of destruction carrying the Appendix C fields auditors actually ask for. The PM Report Server streams status, logs and certificates off the machine while the erase is still running, so a power cut can’t take the record with it and you can watch a whole bench from your phone. Every session exports as a cryptographically signed evidence pack your customer can verify offline with the included verifier — no account, no network, and nothing that stops working if you stop dealing with me. There is also an unattended PXE mode: boot, wipe to policy, report, power down, with nobody at a keyboard. The report server and the verifier ship in the root of the ISO. Nothing extra to buy or install.

VisParted 2.0 was rebuilt from an empty file. It shares no source code with GParted or GNU Parted — I compared the complete source trees rather than assuming — and as of 2.0 it links no other project’s library at run time, including libparted, which earlier releases loaded to resize FAT. It reads and writes GPT, MBR and extended boot records itself, and after every operation it re-reads the disk and proves the result matched the plan. If the disk disagrees, the operation is reported as failed, even when every tool involved reported success.

Moves are journaled and resumable, so losing power partway through no longer means starting over or guessing what state the partition is in. It converts MBR to GPT in place without data loss. And it opens every disk with a findings brief — the problems the probe already proved are there, in plain words, with the cure attached.

If you used VisParted 1, the operation queue and Undo are gone on purpose. A queue plans against a picture of the disk that stops being true the moment the first operation runs, and undo on a partition table is a promise no software can keep once bytes have moved. Each action now compiles into its own plan that you read and approve, simulated against the disk as it is right now, and journaled so it can be finished rather than pretended away.

There’s also a new GTK wrapper for Clonezilla that makes it much easier to run, with options to go back and save information between runs.

The Wipe Free Space app is brand new too and far more capable than the old clunky version. The mounting app has been rebuilt as well and now has a lot more mounting options than before. You can mount BitLocker, NFS, LUKS, FTP, and more. It’s paired with our own GTK file manager, built from scratch.

Parted Magic 2026_03_20

This is the release the current Parted Magic starts from, and the biggest change to the project since the original Secure Erase GUI in 2013.

Over the years Parted Magic had accumulated a lot of programs almost nobody used, and that bloat had real consequences. The default boot mode loads the whole image into RAM, and it had grown to the point of needing 16GB to run reliably, which also made PXE deployment impractical in a lot of environments. Unused and redundant packages are gone and the compression scheme moved from xz to zstd with optimized caching. Parted Magic now boots comfortably in the default mode on machines with 8GB, and the time from the GRUB menu to a loaded desktop is at least ten times faster.

Development of the new Erase program was already well underway when NIST published the SP 800-88r2 update in September 2025. I spent a good while bringing the program into compliance with the revised standard, and those changes shipped in pmagic_2026_03_20_5.iso. If you bought the 2026_03_20 release before that, log into your account and download the updated image at no additional cost.

Save Session was rewritten. The old one blindly copied all of /home and /etc to the flash drive. The new smart detection saves only what actually changed, including installed packages and objects in /usr, and it excludes transient paths like /var and /tmp. Delete a file and save, and that file is transparently removed on the next boot. A later update fixed a remaining Save Session problem and added Ventoy support, which puts a /pmagic folder in your ISO directory.

The Mount GUI and the file manager it is paired with were both written from scratch and tied directly to the Mounter. They are considerably more stable in a live environment than lightweight alternatives that depend on trash directories and udisks. There are also new keyboard layout and language configuration utilities, and a shutdown menu with an optional countdown that makes accidental shutdowns and reboots much harder.

Feedback on all of this is genuinely useful and it does shape what gets built. Bug reports, workflow observations, and even confirmation that something is working as expected all help.

---

News entries prior to Parted Magic 2026_03_20 are archived at https://partedmagic.com/news.txt