Worth its weight in gold! (Powerquest Partition Magic 5.0)

Member Name: IanPaterson

Product:	Powerquest Partition Magic 5.0
Date:	24/08/00 (80 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Easy to use, reliable

Disadvantages: Expensive

Where would I be without good old PM 5.0? Being a sys admin, shuffling servers and disk space about quickly and effectively is the difference between job and no job! Especially when backups fail to run!

PM 5.0 is the latest tool out for managing partition sizes, boot partitions for different operating systems on the same machine and distribution of disk space over multiple fixed disks.

All this it does with excellent reliability. The installation takes no time at all and you are up and running looking at your disk structure. You can move a partition to make one drive bigger and the other smaller, convert it from FAT to FAT32 to NTFS if you want to.

It is a simple 1,2,3 wizard that takes you through changing any of the options. Reboot your machine to implement any changes. Big changes require five to ten minutes of disk reorganisation displayed on a DOS screen at boot up.

There are some words or warning here though. Always back up your hard disks before doing anything drastic. It may look easy, but it is a dramatic thing to move partitions around your disks! I have had some bad experiences with PM losing partitons on committing changes. Apart from NT and 2000, all MS operating systems are based on DOS and FAT tables. These are very fragile things and are not really meant to be changed by deign. The fact that you can is made possible by third party software like PM, it does not mean you should!

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