NWA-PCUG Newsletter Article, April 2003
PowerQuest's Partition Magic 8.0
A Review by David Hinds, NWA-PCUG Vice President
dlhinds@cox-internet.com
(click to email author)


Why do you need it? Ever get tired of leafing through hundreds of documents to find one particular item? Just as you organize your hard copies in your filing cabinet, you can organize the information in your computer in groupings that make sense. Put all of your data that you have painstakingly entered, or otherwise accumulated, in its own drawer (partition) where it can be easily accessed, or backed up rapidly without backing up everything else on your hard drive.

Want to try a new operating system without destroying the one you are finally beginning to feel comfortable with? Partition Magic 8.0 can help you easily create a new partition on which to install it. By having your data in its own partition, it can be accessed by either operating system.

As with previous versions, PowerQuest has provided easy to understand explanations for any of the operations. Version 8.0, when running under windows, has an action panel in its main window with shortcuts for seven of the most common tasks and eight of the operations performed on partitions.

New wizards are available to guide step-by-step in creating a backup partition or installing another operating system. In a previous review of an earlier version I had wished for the ability to move one partition across another. I haven't found that particular function in version 8.0, but the 'copy a partition' task and the 'delete partition' operation serves the same purpose by allowing the copying of a partition to any part of the disk where you can find or create space by adjusting the size of other partitions. The new partition is an exact copy of the original partition, so the original can be deleted once the copy has been made. (Probably few people are very picky about where a partition is located on a disk anyway).

I installed and ran Partition Magic on my notebook which has a Pentium 2.0 Ghz processor, 256 MB RAM, and 40 GB hard drive with Windows XP Home edition as the operating system and also on a desktop with a Pentium 266 Mhz processor, 48 MB RAM, running Windows 98 SE on a 2.6 GB master hard drive and a 40 GB slave drive. Partition Magic performed quite well on both operating systems. Since there was nothing on the slave drive that would be a disaster if I lost it, I used it to experiment with creating a backup partition, copying a partition, moving folders and files and resizing partitions.

The 'Browse partition' operation opens a PowerQuest File Browser that allows you to display the contents of a partition's folders and files. By selecting one or more of the files or folders and right clicking the mouse you have the option to cut, copy, delete, rename, or display properties of the selected file(s). If you choose cut or copy, you then have the ability to change to another partition or drive and by right clicking below the displayed folders and files you get the option of creating a new folder or pasting the selected folders and files to that location. This new feature eliminates having to switch between Partition Magic and Windows Explorer to perform these operations.

Other new features include: support for partitions up to 160 GB; NTFS cluster resize for improved performance; support for Linux Ext3 partitions, GRUB, USB2, and Firewire (1394) (no boot mode support for USB2 and Firewire); and also a free copy of PowerQuest DataKeeper which I have been using for the last two years (for which I paid $30, User Group Discounted price). Datakeeper provides an automatic backup (duplicate copy) of your data files at the location of your choice (hard drive partition, superdisk, zip drive, etc.).

I recommend Partition Magic 8.0 to everyone who is interested in better organization of their drives because of the ease of operation. I have not gone into a detailed step-by-step explanation of any of the tasks or operations because PowerQuest does that as you perform them.

PowerQuest informs that "User group members may purchase PartitionMagic v8 at a special price of $35 by ordering from the secure web site at http://www.ugr.com/order/. Indicate the special price code of UGEVAL02 with your order."

Gene Barlow
User Group Relations
P.O. Box 275
Orem, UT 84059-0275
801-796-7370
barlow@ugr.com
http://www.ugr.com

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