Rating: Summary: Accomplished what I bought it for...does offer more Review: I bought Partition Magic 7.0 to merge and reapportion some ill-thought out, too small partitions on my old 8.4gig drive. (I'll never need more than 900 megs...Ha!) I liked that I could stick with FAT for now and keep compatibility with some older programs I'm holding on to. I can always upgrade to FAT32 later if I want. This will also let me setup multiple boot options easily.The interface is intuitive, Drivemapper (which searches your hard drive to change obsolete drive references) is great, and I had no problems in the limited usage I have put it through. The manual is quite dry and a tough read, so I pretty much winged it, just double-checking with the manual as I went. It's a little pricy for the limited use I'm going to put it through, but I don't mind paying for a reliable utility that does exactly what it advertises.
Rating: Summary: This Product can be by-passed Review: I bought this product to partition my HDD and prepare a multi-boot system. After partitioning my HDD using PM7.0 It converted the new partition as a Non-bootable partition, renamed my 'C :' drive thereby locking me from progressing in my goals. I had to finally format my complete HDD and partition it using the windows setup and re-install the OS. You can create multiple partitions using the "Windows Setup" or "Windows 2000 Setup" disk. This will require you to delete all your current partition and re-create the partitions (Say, 75GB = 25GB + 50GB). Once the partition is created, proceed with the installation of the first OS (say, Win 2k on 25GB). After successful completion, reformat the second partition (50GB), created earlier, and install the 2nd OS in the new partition (say, Win XP). After successful installation of the second OS, you will get an option of selecting the OS which you want to log onto. Partition Magic is NOT required if you plan your partition at your first use of the system. Its a complete waste of Money. I'm selling off my PM7.0 ... Any takers!!
Rating: Summary: Good Customer Support! Review: I bought this software, and it worked for a while. However when I upgraded to Linux EXT3 file-system it messed up the software. It would claim there was an error on the drive and would CORRUPT my linux partition! So NOT RECOMMENEDED IF YOU HAVE LINUX, as it only supports the EXT2 file-system. However there customer-support is excellent! Called there customer support number and they set me up with a refund, so thats excellent! This is why I gave it four stars - for the company not the product.
Rating: Summary: Do it at your own risk! Review: I do not recommend this product. It says: 'Create, resize, merge, and convert partitions without destroying your data'. That claim is false. I had tried to partition one 4GB harddrive and it failed. I lost everything on the HD. They recommend doing a backup first. If I had the possibility to do a backup then I would not need this product, right? I could use fdisk instead! Way cheaper. Plus after 6 months this product becomes obsolete, they will not support it anymore, if you want support you need to upgrade. The customer support sucks, I filled out a form on the website, after a week nothing. I called, I talked to a support specialist, he asked me to send some file. I sent the file. I waited another week or so. I called again, they did nothing. Into the end after staying on the phone for about 45 mins the person suggested that it was my fault. Of course it is my fault! It's my fault because I bought the product! Plus they do not have a toll free number, you pay for the call. The holding time is quite long which makes you think: if they have such a great product, why the wait? Because their product has flaws, that's why! My recomandations: 1. If you really, really need PM look for an older version that you can find used. It is not worth paying the price for just one job. 2. If you want to install Linux (like I wanted) better buy an extra haddrive of 4GB instead. It will cost you less, you won't have to go through all the hassles of backing up, calling customer support, waiting weeks until they bother to respond.
Rating: Summary: Just what I expected!!! Review: I don't understand why other users are having issues. This is an excellent program; I don't however, recommend it to people with limited knowledge about partitions, dual boots, etc... I bought it because I have multiple OS's in one of my computers at home (XP, 2000, 98) some of which are running low in space. Rather than point to different drives, I figure it is better to allocate more space from one partition to the other (disk merging). It worked like a charm; it let me change the size of one partition, then merge the empty partition to the one running low. What more can you ask for! I hope this info helps you decide.
Rating: Summary: PartitionMagic worked flawlessly for me Review: I had read some reviews from other customers who had experienced significant problems so I was very cautious using the product. From Start to Finish I experienced no problems. I used PartitionMagic to resize my C: drive to create space for a Redhat Linux install. I created the free space then the linux partitions using PartitionMagic and then used the Redhat installation CD to install Linux. My system is a Compaq 5900z with a win98se os. Definitely try this product!
Rating: Summary: PowerQuest support and WinXP Review: I have owned multiple copies and versions of PowerQuest products for years, including DriveCopy, DataKeeper (orphaned under WinXP), DriveImage, and especially, PartitionMagic. I enthusiastically encouraged friends and co-workers to use the products also, despite their predatory marketing (every function is sold as a separate "product", and my timing always seems to be to buy a new PC and PartitionMagic a few weeks before the next release comes out - too bad, buy again!). I recently had a problem with trying to resize the partitions on my year old PC with PartitionMagic 7 - bought with the PC and used ONCE to originally create the partitions. I was able to take the 20GB space from my data partition but unable to move it to my WindowsXP Pro partition, getting message "ERROR #1513 BAD ATTRIBUTE POSITION IN FILE RECORD". I contacted PQ and their fix is to upgrade to PM 8. I am out of work so I decided to just give up the 20GB of orphaned space, but yesterday I found that DriveImage is not working either (same error message). So now I can not backup my PC and all my existing backups of my OS and data are worthless. With the current price of hard drives so low, my hard drive partitioning days are over! For the price I paid for these products I could have bought a second hard drive and Norton Ghost or some other backup program which hasn't been ruined by corporate bean counters. These WERE great products, but I'm through with using them.
Rating: Summary: Excellent Product Review: I have used PartitionMagic since version 2.0. I think this is one of the greatest piece of software ever written. The software works wonderfully and is very useful if you want to setup more than one operating system on your computer. However, there is one thing that I should say : if you are already using 6.0 and do not use Windows XP, then do not buy 7.0. Version 7.0 and 6.0 are almost the same except for the support of XP in 7.0.
Rating: Summary: Does its job, but not exactly flawlessly! Review: I have Windows XP Professional on my PC, and was battling saturation of my C: partition for the past few months (it used to have a size of 2047 Mb, NTFS formatted). I bought Partition Magic to resize the C: partition, hoping to increase it to something like 4000 Mb, since my D: partition has plenty of unused space. After installation of Partition Magic, when I attempted to resize my C: drive for the first time, it indicated a maximum allowable size of only 2886 Mb, although the system had around 9 Gb of unused space. I set it for this maximum, and it seemed to proceed fine, but near the very end it complained of some error with the index structure, and exited, leaving me with the same C: drive size of 2047 Mb, but with unallocated space of 839 Mb. Well, I tried it one more time, and this time set it up for C: size less of 2600 Mb which was less than the maximum allowed of 2886 Mb. This time it went through fine. So, to summarize: Positives: -- It did work finally (albeit not without pain). -- It did not wipe out my PC's hard disk. -- It is intuitive to use, and most computer literate folks should be able to figure it out, without requiring a PhD. -- Excellent graphical user interface, that eliminates any ambiguities Negatives: -- Did not allow me to expand my C: partition to the size that I wanted. -- Should have indicated an accurate maximum size that I could expand the partition to, instead of indicating a size that was too large. -- Made me iterate the procedure a couple of times until I got it right after trial and error.
Rating: Summary: Great Experience with Product and Tech Support Review: I partitioned my Campaq laptop so I could install Red hat Linux 7.2 and it worked just fine for me. I also used Boot Magic so I can dual boot easily between Linux and Win 2K. I made a mistake in the configuration of Boot Magic and had to call Tech support. I got right through and Derek had my machine up and running in 10 minutes. All in all a most pleasant experience given the general state of tech support these days. I highly recommend this product. Besides it's made it Utah.
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