Best partition software partition magic

A utility for hard drive organization from Symantec Corporation, Cupertino, CA www.symantec.com.that allows disk partitions to be changed on the fly without destroying existing data. By making multiple smaller drives out of a large one, their cluster sizes are lowered and waste less space.

Officially called "Norton PartitionMagic," this highly praised product runs in Windows and supports FAT (DOS, Windows 95, 98 and ME), NTFS (Windows NT, 2000, XP) and EXT 2/3 (Linux) File Systems. Without a product like this, the DOS Fdisk utility is used to repartition a hard disk, and all data are lost in the process. PartitionMagic was originally introduced in 1995 by PowerQuest Corporation, Orem, UT, a company acquired by Symantec in 2003. See partition.

PartitionMagic is a computer program for hard disk drive partitioning originally made by the PowerQuest corporation but now owned by Symantec. The program runs on Microsoft Windows operating systems or from a bootable CD-ROM and enables creation and modification of partitions. Existing partitions can be resized without loss of data.

Details

PartitionMagic is capable of resizing NTFS or FAT (16 or 32) partitions without data loss, and can copy and move partitions, including to other disks. It also has various other features, including being able to convert between FAT16, FAT32 and NTFS, modify the cluster size of FAT16/32 and NTFS filesystems, and merge adjacent FAT or NTFS filesystems (all without data loss, though some NTFS-only metadata is lost on conversion to FAT). Additionally, it has somewhat limited support for ext2 and ext3 partitions.

Partition Magic releases through 3 were offered both in OS/2 and Windows versions. Symantec's Partition Magic version 8 only supports Windows.

Future versions

PartitionMagic, while under PowerQuest, was updated regularly, adding new and useful features. Since Symantec purchased the application, there has not yet been a new release, and Symantec has stated that it has no plans on releasing a new version.

Compatibility issues

PartitionMagic is compatible with Windows NT, 98, ME, 2000, and XP desktop editions.

When run on a server edition it displays a dialog box reading "PartitionMagic cannot run on Windows NT/2000/.NET Server.".It fails to run under Windows Vista. When launched, with a Windows Vista partition present, even from another version of Windows, Partition Magic displays the following error: "Init failed: Error 117. Partition's drive letter cannot be identified."