Customer Reviews

PartitionMagic 7.0 [OLD VERSION]

5 star:		(21)
4 star:		(11)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(12)

 

 

I've used Partition Magic since version 3.0. Partition Magic 7.0 is now WinXP compatable and supports hard drives up to 80 GB. This software is a phenominal program that allows hard drive repartitioning "on-the-fly" and easy booting into different operating systems. I have a PC-DOS/Win3.1 partition and a Win98SE partition on the same hard drive and a WixXP partition (preview version) on a second hard drive. I have also had a Linux partition on the first drive. You can resize partitions and convert from fat 16 to fat32 and back. You can also divide one large hard drive into several drives to help organize data and files. Boot Magic (and the previous Boot Manager) are great to allow easy booting into any OS that you have on your drive. Partition Magic has never given my a problem. I have never lost data. The manual is clear, well written and easy to follow. If you want to have more than one OS on your computer or to try out a new OS or upgrade (like WinXP), then this program is a must have. Highly recommended.

PartitionMagic is an excellent program for partitioning down your hard drive. Using a graphical interface that is easy for most people to understand, you can perform numerous operations with almost virtually the click of a button.

Partitioning your hard drive with this program is as simple as specifying how much space you want and where that space is to come from. You can even let PartitionMagic change drive references for you if necessary! That little feature saves time and a lot of frustration! Need to resize a partition that is already created? No problem, select resize specify how you want it resized, let the system reboot and you're in business.

You can convert partitions from one type (say FAT32) to another (NTFS) especially useful if you upgraded to XP and kept your old FAT file system. This action is performed well...

You can also check partitions for errors using this program, although you can do just as well using Windows included utilities.

The price is kinda steep, but would you want to risk your data with a cheap piece of software? I have used this software numerous times, on numerous machines, and have had minimal errors. Definitely back your data up just in case, but nine times out of ten you'll be up and running in no time...

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.

The very first time I ran PowerQuest's partition magic,
it generated an illegal partition. Worse, it could not
correct the bad partition boundary or recover my lost
disk space.

I communicated with PowerQuest's tech support staff for
six months before they claimed to have a fix. For me to
get this fix, however, I would have to BUY a brand new
version of partition magic. Forget that the version I
bought never worked. Forget the warranty; it expired
while tech support was researching/ignoring the problem!

I reported this chicanery to the BBB. PowerQuest's legal
staff tried to convince the BBB that this was a hardware
problem and that I never followed up after my initial
complaint, so the problem must have been resolved. Their
story changed, however, after I provided a copy of all
correspondence between myself and PowerQuest's technical
support staff (who admitted it was their software bug).

Unfortunately, PowerQuest eventually declined BBB's offer
of independent arbitration.

My recommendation -- avoid Partition Magic and any other
PowerQuest product. Bad software. Bad company.

Note - If you have a single boot-disk configuration,
either just re-install and set the disk partitions
at installation time, or try Partition Commander.

I wanted to turn my W98SE desktop into a dual boot machine with WinXP on another new partition. Partition Magic was able to do this for me with ease. It first enabled me to resize my existing W98 C drive, and then create a new partition for XP. I also use BootMagic, the boot controller, that enables me to choose which system I boot into.

I have found this setup great for me as I wanted to upgrade to XP but didn't want to go through the hassle of upgrading everything at once with my existing software. This way I can effectively run my PC's systems in parallel as I check on various options for completing my XP environment. The one caveat that people should be aware of is that I know people that have had absolute disasters using PM7.0 when they installed and ran the program from their existing C drive. I would recommend users running PM 7.0 from the rescue disks (and booting from them). I had to do it this way since I had Norton System works on my PC, which can conflict with PM 7.0 installed. You get all the same functionality that you would running from the OS but you might lose the wizard interface.

From my own experience: I had a C drive that was really squeezed for space, and a D drive on the same physical disk with plenty of room. I know how tricky drive partitioning can be, particularly if you're dealing with an existing drive with data on it. I was not going to try to deal with this myself at the DOS level, and upgrading the physical drive to a larger size is just as risky. I heard about Partition Magic, and decided to give it a try. I bought it, used it once, and it was worth every penny! Repartitioning my existing drive went flawlessly, and the wizard interface was easy to use. I recommend it!

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.

The several times I used it, Partition Magic worked fine. Then last month it died in the middle -- leaving a 30 gig partition invisible.

I called tech support, only to discover that I couldn't speak to a tech person unless I bought a new copy. You may think you're buying a licensed copy of Partition Magic, but according to the support person I spoke to, you will get no support six months after the next version comes out.

Could tech support have recovered the partition that Partition Magic trashed? I had no way to find out without buying a new copy of the program. And that I wasn't willing to do.

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.

Its good, but why is this even here when Partition Magic 8.0 is already available? When I used PM7, it had some minor compatibility issues with Windows XP. Partition Magic 8.0 seemed to have corrected these errors, so its a moot point. ...