Laffctx

Has anyone here used Partition Magic before? Is it a stable program? I have always used fdisk to make partitions but I would like to have a program that would allow me to partition peoples hd's without losing their data. And, how is Boot Magic for setting up dual boot?

thanks in advance,

Laffctx

johnwill

I have used PM extensively for years. IMO, it's the cream of the crop as far as on-the-fly partitioning is concerned. That being said, it's not perfect, and if you do enough partition hacking, it'll scramble one now and then. Backups are always essential when you're doing something like this.

For backups, I have a large USB disk and Norton's GHOST. If I have a customer machine with data that he wants to keep, I do a GHOST run before I do anything else. I've only needed them a couple of times, but OH when you need them, you REALLY need them! :D

Laffctx

I got PM and I am really astounded about what a great program it is. I also use Ghost a lot. Ghost is a lifesaver for sure. I used PM on my laptop and I cant believe how great and user friendly it is. Thanks for all your input.

thanks again,

Laffctx

johnwill

It's just like any other task, having the right tools really makes the job much easier. :D

x5dr

make sure you have made the 2 floppy Partition Magic recovery disks

johnwill

Actually, the smart play is to backup everything of value "before" you turn PM loose on a disk! :D

Chevy

Between the two you can really save hours of work.

Plus the insuarance against the "Oops" factor - :)

What's impressive with Ghost is how fast it is.

PM - I've never had a problem. Not even when one of my guys used it on a production NT server (Exchange IM Gateway ....)

Great software that works as advertised - Hear that Microsoft?

webslingers

I have an oops with PM that I hope someone has an answer for. A friend of mine was trying to do something I asked him to and make a new partition on my 2nd hard drive. Fine, but now the computer doesn't startup. It just reboots constantly. It doesn't see the 1st drive anymore. I found out that he did something like set one partition on the 2nd drive to be active. Can this be undone, or can I at least get my files off of the hd if I use it as a 2nd on another computer? Thanks for any answers.

joeb2000

I have a Problem I needed to partition a buddys hard drive and he didnt have a floppy so i just put hard drive on my system and used partition magic to format and partition it. everything went fine but after i took the disk off of my system 2 others appeared. one on each of my physical disks. The files system is raw and only explorer sees them. they take up 0 space. they are more of an annoyance than a problem really but i would like to know how to get rid of them. I tried putting his Hd back in my system it shows upo but they are still there. they do not appear in disk manager and partition magic wont even load, because it cant find them but windows is telling it that there are 2 drives but there is not.

johnwill

This sounds like a corrupted partition table. I've seen this before, and there used to be partition table editors in the DOS days. I believe that one comes with Partition Magic, PTEDIT?

dmitriyaz

hi everyone.
i have a feeling that im missing something here, but i seem to have a problem with Partition Magic 8.
i have one big NTFS partition on my 120bg harddrive with everything on it. i wanted to shrink it and make a new one in the freed up space, but beyond opening the "resize/move partition" window, it won't do anything. it doesn't freeze up, but whatever i do, the values don't change.
what could be wrong?
thanks

johnwill

Are you sure you have space to shrink it? I just fired up PM8 and pointed it at a 160gig NTFS volume. It allowed me to move the slider down to the point where the partition size equaled the data on the partition. Obviously, I didn't commit the changes! :D

dmitriyaz

i do have 2gb left, but the slider didn't move one bit.
maybe its because the data-to-no-data ratio is too big on the volume? or because i have my current windows install on it? or because i have the PM8 running off of it?
also, the "max. size" and the "min. size" values that show up under the slider are the same.
thanks

johnwill

If you only have 2gb left on a 120gb drive, why in the world are you trying to shrink the partition?

dmitriyaz

i wanted to test PM8, for one.

Derek Potter

Partition Magic does work. But as one poster has said, it occasionally makes a mistake. To be fair on it, the only times I've seen this are when I've forced it to do something it didn't want to. For example, I made an extended partition to occupy 100% of the remaining space. PQM decided to leave 7.8Mb unallocated at the end. I turned this into a separate logical partition, which, before applying the changes, PQM displayed as being part of the extended partition. After applying the changes, it showed the disk as "bad" and wouldn't let me change anything (duh?). I had to examine the partition table and manually patch it - not a job for the faint-hearted. The problem was that two partitions overlapped - bad news for any data in them, which fortunately wasn't the case.

I have never had PQM lose any data, but I suspect it will cause immense damage if you have a power outage while it's moving stuff. Maybe it tries to do it all safely, but I run the PC off a UPS just to make sure. Battery power should be Ok.

One problem with PQM is that it is not a *repair* tool. It will complain about errors but it is nervous about fixing them. Likewise it is useless for getting a HD up and running in the first place. For this you will need a program that writes a loader to the MBR. Windows fdisk with the /mbr switch does this, but you need to understand that it loads a very basic *Microsoft* loader. When you set a partition "active", it's this program that recognises it and tries to boot from it.

Multi-boot programs may 1) accept the decision and then divert the boot from the chosen partition's OS into its own menu and thence to whatever you choose, or 2) replace the MBR code and just boot whatever you tell it. Boot programs need not take any notice of whether the partition is active or even whether its visible - "visible" just means "visible to a particular OS".

As you will guess, this all means you can have a chain of bootloaders all providing you with a menu and all capable of booting OSs. Fortunately decent bootloaders try to boot the OS, not the entire partition, or you would be able to create an endless chain ;)

Sorry about the long diversion, but I think a lot of the troubles blamed onto PQM are really to do with managing the boot process, which, unfortunately, PQM doesn't address.

The boot process is a mysterious business, largely because so many people and organizations have issued rules of thumb as if they are absolute truth, so it's really hard getting to the bottom of it all. Take what follows with a pinch of salt.

Last time I looked, the PQ Boot Manager ran in its own partition I think (or maybe in a bit of the disk which it reserves for itself), which is fine as it means it boots immediately, but I don't know how good it is at finding different non-Windows bootable partitions. The Win 2000/XP boot menu program runs in the active partition, it's booted and then promptly displays a menu.

The nicest boot loaders seem to be the Linux ones, especially GRUB. Currently my system has the XP partition "active" but GRUB lives in the MBR so it ignores this and comes up even if I fiddle with the active partition (as long as the rest of GRUB is still there in Linux). This was my choice, it's perfectly possible to have GRUB as the second loader in the chain (preferably in the Linux partition!), in which case you will probably have a Microsoft loader in the MBR by default and, I assume, you will have to set Linux to active in order to get GRUB to come up.

If you don't want Linux and haven't got an NT-based OS, by all means use the PQ boot manager. If you have Win 2000 or XP, don't bother, just modify the boot.ini file to offer you as many OSs as you like. This file is installed (together with two nt*.exe files) on the root of the active partition. I'm not sure how or whether other OSs find them so it's easier and safer to make the NT partition active and have them there. If you use a different bootloader and want to disable the NT "second menu", just set the timeout to 0 in boot.ini. Editing boot.ini for anything else can be a tad awkward, so read up about it first and back it up before you fiddle. I *think* it's smart enough to offer you "Windows" if you muck up the "XP" line. The Pro versions have a utility to make editing simpler.

I suppose if you really wanted to suffer, you could boot through the PQ loader and choose Linux, choose XP when GRUB comes up and then have the XP menu offer you the same choices all over again :/