PartitionMagic Pro 6.0

Juggling OSs is a challenging task. You might run Windows 2000 or Windows NT as your primary OS but perform daily tasks that require Windows 9x, OS/2, or even Linux. Choosing file systems for your partitions is also a tricky decision, and your OS can’t modify a partition without wiping out data. PowerQuest's PartitionMagic Pro 6.0 is up to these challenges.

PartitionMagic Pro manages and modifies disk partitions more effectively than DOS's Fdisk utility or Win2K’s Disk Management tool. The product dynamically creates, copies, moves, and resizes partitions without affecting your data. PartitionMagic Pro can convert partitions from virtually any file system to any other—including FAT32 to FAT and NTFS to FAT conversions that your OS can’t handle without the product. The product also lets you cleanly manage, boot, and switch between multiple OSs—Win2K, NT, Windows Me, Win9x, OS/2, and Linux—on one PC.

PartitionMagic runs under Win2K, NT with Service Pack 4 (SP4) and later, Windows Me, Win9x, and DOS. Your Win2K system needs 64MB of memory and your NT system needs 32MB of memory to run the product. This product version is incompatible with Win2K Server and NT Server. (However, PowerQuest’s ServerMagic offers PartitionMagic Pro’s functionality for these OSs.)

To test the product, I set up a Pentium III workstation with two EIDE hard disks: a 4GB master drive and a 2GB slave drive. I installed Win2K Professional on the master drive and left the slave drive unpartitioned. I performed a simple, straightforward installation under Win2K. Installation creates a set of rescue disks that you can use to boot your PC and run PartitionMagic Pro if your boot partition is ever inaccessible. PartitionMagic 5.01 worked with Win2K only through these rescue disks. However, PartitionMagic 6.0 and PartitionMagic Pro 6.0 support Win2K natively.

Loading PartitionMagic Pro on Win2K resulted in a display of the program’s GUI, which Figure 1 shows. The left pane shows a treeview of your hard disk and partitions. The right panes display partition disk maps as visual representations of disk size and type. The bottom pane presents icons for PartitionMagic Pro’s wizards. The wizards guide you through five key functions: creating a new partition, resizing an existing partition, redistributing disk space, merging partitions, and copying a partition. You access all other commands from drop-down and pop-up menus.

I ran the Create New Partition Wizard to partition and format my slave drive. PartitionMagic Pro asked whether I wanted to use the partition to store an OS or data files. Choosing to store an OS results in the partition being formatted as a primary volume. However, I chose the second option: using the partition for data. PartitionMagic Pro then asked which file system to use for the partition: FAT, FAT32, NTFS, Linux ext2, or HPFS. I chose FAT. I chose to format the partition as primary rather than logical (i.e., for storing data within an extended partition). Finally, the wizard wanted to know how much space to allocate the partition, and I told it to use all available disk space.

PartitionMagic Pro displayed my selections and a before-and-after view of my partition. The product batches and previews the commands, then lets you cancel the process, add commands, or run the commands. The commands run in one process. PartitionMagic Pro set up my new disk in less than 5 minutes. As a test, I copied several files and directories to the new partition. The files and directories copied successfully.

New in PartitionMagic Pro 6.0 is an Undelete feature that can restore a deleted partition. To test this feature, I deleted the partition on my slave disk, then used Win2K’s Disk Management tool to verify the deletion. Next, I selected Undelete from PartitionMagic Pro’s Operations drop-down menu. The product scanned my disk and presented a list of recoverable partitions, including the partition I had deleted. I selected that partition and clicked OK. The undelete process took a few minutes. I opened Windows Explorer to verify that the partition was restored and that its files and directories were readable.

PartitionMagic Pro can convert between almost any two file systems. To test this process, I right-clicked my 2GB FAT-formatted slave drive in the treeview pane and selected Convert from the resulting menu. I could convert the partition to FAT32, NTFS, or HPFS, and I could either keep the partition as a primary volume or convert it to a logical volume. I selected FAT32 and left the partition as a primary volume. After I applied the changes, I confirmed that the partition’s files and directories were intact. I right-clicked the partition again, chose Convert, and this time, converted to NTFS. (PartitionMagic Pro uses Win2K’s or NT’s Convert command to convert partitions to NTFS.) After this conversion, I right-clicked the partition again and converted from NTFS to FAT32, then back to FAT. After each conversion, I checked the partition’s files for readability.

To let you adeptly manage multiple OSs on one PC, the product keeps each OS secure in an individual partition. I wanted to set up my system for a Win2K and NT dual-boot, so I created a new partition to run NT on my master drive. I decided to create this partition manually rather than use the Create New Partition Wizard. To do so, I first needed to resize my Win2K partition to create enough space for the NT partition. I right-clicked the Win2K partition and selected Resize/Move. I then dragged markers on a bar graph to resize the partition to 1800MB; you can also type the size you want in a text box. I then chose whether to create the free space before or after the existing partition. I left about 2GB of space before the Win2K partition. After I applied the changes, the product rebooted the PC and ran a batch command outside of Win2K to resize the partition.