for partitioning

GParted is my tool of choice for partitioning. Many Linux distros ship with it; if the distro has a live session, just boot into it, run GParted as root, and get to work on your partitions. For example, in the past I've often run GParted from live sessions of MEPIS. More recently, I've used GParted in MX-14.

Parted Magic is one of the nicest distros for managing hard drives. It comes with Openbox, and it's loaded with tools -- including GParted, of course. The download will cost you about $10 bucks these days. I've still got a version on a flash drive from back when it was free (from pmagic_2013_05_01.iso), but Parted Magic is definitely worth the money, in my opinion.

Or you can just grab GParted Live. This is probably my favorite way to go. I downloaded gparted-live-0.20.2-i486.iso (only about 219 MB), used Unetbootin to put it on a flash drive, and booted it up. The GParted app started up automatically:

Besides GParted itself, GParted Live ships with Fluxbox, the PCManFM file manager, the Leafpad text editor, the LXTerminal terminal emulator, the NetSurf web browser, and a handful of other tools. As you can see in the release announcement, the current release is based on the Debian Sid repos as of October 24, 2014.

GParted Live page at DistroWatch: http://distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=gparted

GParted Live homepage: http://gparted.org/