GParted is now in the book
 

That's not exactly a newspaper headline, but GParted is something most distros install. And it was recently added to the BLFS book. Before now, I had been installing it by following the instructions in the README file in the gparted tarball. It's a comparatively easy one to build and install. There is a bit of a descent into a dependency tree, but it is not a maddening one.

The book doesn't mention them, but you should consider installing packages for supporting various filesystems that you are interested in before starting (see the tarball README). I only needed these...

ntfs-3g_ntfsprogs (also newly added to the book) for NTFS support
dosfstools (not in the book) for DOS support
mtools (not in the book) for FAT volume labels

GParted has to be run by root, and it needs the environment path to the various filesystem utilities. In Arch, I created launchers for GParted that used gksu. In BLFS, I use xterm -e 'su -l -c gparted &>>/dev/null' in my Fluxbox menu to start it with a prompt for root to login. Anyway, it works as expected.

Tks for the tip, really appreciated.