Norton PartitionMagic 8.0

Rating:
Summary: Awesome. And, better yet, it even works.
Review: This product does what is otherwise impossible: shrinks a partition without disturbing the data therein.
Also it works very fast! It takes just a minute or two to shrink or expand a partition.

It has always worked for me. If you wonder why you would need this software, don't worry about it. If you need it, you know it. And when you need it, this is the only program on earth that will do this work.
When you need it and it works it is AWESOME!

Here's an example:
Say you have a teaching lab with 8 computers. You want to use Power Quest Drive Image to create a clone of the hard disk on computer #1 on CD. Then every Friday night after class you can restore the image on all 8 computers and Monday morning all your computers are fresh and ready, regardless of what last week's students did.

Computer #1 has a 100 GB hard drive in a single partition, but only 1GB is actually in use. The rest is free space. Since Drive Image backs up a partition at a time, you will need enough CDs to hold 100GB of compressed data, even though most of it will just be zeros. That might take you many CDs. What you need is a way to shrink the partition size down to just the 1GB in use. Conventional tools will not allow you to do this....they erase all the data in the partition if you shrink it. That kills you! That forces you to back up all the data to another hard drive, delete the partition, recreate the partition to the 1GB size, then format the partition, then reload the data from the spare hard drive, if possible, then create your Drive Image CD, and then go to through the whole process again to expand the partition back. This could take all day.

With Partition Magic, you just insert a diskette and about two minutes later you are done shrinking the partition to the needed size! Snap your image CD and then fire up Partition Magic again and in another two minutes the partition is back where it started! With this technology available doing it the old way makes about as much sense as using a Radio Shack cassette tape player for data storage on your IBM-PC instead of a hard drive.

The former owner of this program, Power Quest, was granted several patents on this technique. Check it out at www.uspto.gov - it's fascinating reading. Paraphrasing their words: obviously this function is not easy since it took 15 years from the introduction of the IBM-PC for someone to invent it.