Customer Reviews

Norton Partition Magic 8.0

5 star:		(29)
4 star:		(18)
3 star:		(6)
2 star:		(7)
1 star:		(22)

 

 

If you have a Sony Vaio this review is for you. In the past Sony has created small C:\ drives and large D:\ drives. So C:\ quickly fills with additional programs and then you need PM to fix it (move some from D:\ to C:\). But I kept getting errors with PM running in Windows. Sony was no help, and Symantec (who makes PM) had one suggestion - run it in DOS. That solved the problem and then PM works well.

Want details? start PM in windows and select "create rescue discs". These boot the computer in dos. Next (this will all make sense when you actually do it) select D:\ and tell it to shrink that partition by, say, 10GB AND specify that the 10GB be located IN FRONT of the new, smaller D:\. This places the "set aside" space before D:\, but right after C:\. Then select C:\ and tell it to make C:\ larger by 10Gb. If you don't do these steps in this order the program doesn't detect any extra space to give to C:\. It took me hours of "playing with it" to figure this out, so I hope this saves someone some grief.

The box claims that the product will convert partitions on USB 2.0 drives up to 300GB. That appears to be untrue. The box also claims "Award-Winning Support". Given the complete inability to solve or even diagnose the problem on 2 different occasions, I wonder just what kind of award they won. Least capable? Most downsized?

Here's the chat transcript. You be the judge.

Vijay: Hi, thank you for contacting Symantec Live Technical Support. My name is Vijay. How may I help you?
Paul: I have just installed Partition Magic 8.05. I have a 250 GB USB drive which I want to convert from NTFS to FAT32. The convert dialog box has all the options grayed out EXCEPT turning the primary partition into a Logical partition.
Paul: Is it possible to do the conversion? (This is why I bought Partition Magic in the first place.)
Vijay: Before troubleshooting any further, I need to gather some more information from you. May I proceed?
Paul: Sure
Vijay: Thank you.
Vijay: Did you partition the drive into small partitions?
Paul: No. It is one partition.
Vijay: Is it external drive or internal drive?
Paul: By the way, I called on Friday and someone tried to figure this out and was supposed to call back. They never did.
Paul: The case number is <nnn>. External drive. Maxtor. USB. 250 GB
Vijay: Can you please be on hold while I refer to the documents. This may take 2-3 minutes.
Paul: Sure
Vijay: Thank you.
Vijay: Thank you for being online.
Vijay: Paul, does the Partition Magic options are enabled in other internal drives?
Paul: Yes, it is enabled for the internal drive.
Paul: The box claims that it works for USB 2.0 drives, which is what this one is.
Vijay: How many internal hard drives do you have installed in your computer?
Paul: It's a notebook computer. There is 1 internal hard drive (100 gb). And there is 1 external USB hard drive (250 gb). The USB drive is directly connected to the computer (no hubs or anything like that).
Vijay: How many partitions are there in internal hard drive?
Paul: one
Paul: Computer is running WinXP Home
Paul: Drive is not compressed, encrypted or anything else strange.
Vijay: What is the file system of the internal harddrive?
Paul: NTFS
Vijay: Is the create partition option enabled for external drive?
Paul: There are 2 panels on the screen. The top one, labeled "Pick a task..." has a task labeled "Create a new partition" and it is available.
Paul: The lower panel, labeled "Partition Operations" has an entry labeled "Create Partition" which is GRAYED OUT.
Paul: Same menu availability for both the internal and external drives.
Vijay: Do you get the option Convert when you right click on the external hard drive?
Paul: Yes. And it pops up a dialog box with everything UNAVAILABLE except "logical partition".
Paul: If I do the same thing on the internal drive, I DO have the option to convert to FAT32.
Vijay: Does the external drive is labelled as 'Unallocated' ?
Paul: Not sure what you mean.
Vijay: Do you see the external hard drive in Partition Magic console is marked as unallocated or written as unallocated in it?
Paul: No. It's all NTFS.
Vijay: Alright.
Paul: MAXTOR250 (E:) NTFS 239,366.9
Vijay: This issue could be due to size of the Harddrive. I suggest that you diveide the hadrdrive by creating a new partition in it and then try to convert both partitions.
Paul: That won't work for me. The whole point here was to mount the drive on a wireless router. I believe that it only recognizes a single partition.
Paul: The Partition Magic box claims that it works on partitions up to 300 GB and on USB drives.
Paul: This one's only 250 GB. It's less than 35% used.
Paul: There are no open files that I know of.
Paul: Is there a way to force all files closed on the drive?
Paul: (Other than "Remove Hardware" which would keep Partition Magic from seeing it too.)
Vijay: Converting the file system will delete all the data that is present on the drive.
Paul: Not according to the documentation.
Paul: I'm not trying to reFORMAT the drive. I'm trying to convert it.
Paul: And again, the box claims "Converts partitions among FAT, FAT32, and NTFS without losing data."
Paul: Vijay: Is there second line support available? I'd like this to get escalated. Thanks.
Vijay: There may be chances of losing the data. it is recommended to backup the data before converting teh file system.
Paul: Of course.
Paul: Please connect me to the second line support people. Thanks
Vijay: Can you please be on hold while I refer to the documents. This may take 2-3 minutes.
Paul: Vijay: Are you unable to escalate this incident?
Vijay: Thank you for being online.
Vijay: You will be getting an email within 24 hours, if I escalte the issue to my supervisor. Is that OK with you?
Paul: Vijay: I logged the request on Friday. I was supposed to get a call back THAT DAY. No call on Friday. No call on Saturday. No call on Sunday.
Vijay: Are you getting the option to convert the partition to Logical while you select convert option?
Paul: Now you've tried to solve the problem and were unable to resolve it.
Paul: I'd like someone to work on this problem NOW.
Vijay: I promise you that you receive a mail within 24 hours.
Paul: Yes. As I said at the beginning "LOGICAL" is the only choice available in that dialog box.
Paul: Vijay. I have no reason to doubt you personally, but quite frankly Symantec is 0 for 1 right now on follow through and 0 for 2 on problem solving. I'd like to get this problem solved today.
Vijay: In order to convert the partition to FAT32, you can take a backup of the drive and format the drive and select File system as FAT32.
Paul: Sure. And I can drive over it with my car and go buy a new drive formatted with FAT32. I bought Partition Magic so that I wouldn't have to do that.
Vijay: I apologize for the inconvenience caused.
Paul: Thanks for the apology. But let's solve the problem.
Paul: You do have supervisors there today, don't you?
Vijay: As the supervisors are busy with resolving the other escalated issues, you would receive a mail within 24 hours.
Paul: Well, since my request is now 48 hours old, seems like I ought to be right at the top of the queue, doesn't it?
Vijay: Please note taht we do not have access to records of Voice support. Since you have contacted Chat support now with the issue, you will receive a mail within 24 hours, or you can get back to us through Chat.
Paul: Ok Vijay. Send me the email. I'll be waiting.

This is the absolute worst piece of software I have ever bought.
I wanted to merge 2 partitions on the same drive, so I bought this software. After installing it, I ran the utility, and when my computer rebooted I got "Error 1520: External attribute header mismatch (EA3905F0)" It tells me that I need to run chkdsk /f on the D: drive, except that the D: Drive has now dissappeared, along with all the data on the drive. So I call Symantec, but hang up after 90 minutes on hold. I try again the next day, get someone in India who repeatedly tells me that I need to run chkdsk on drive D:. I tell him it's not possible as the drive letter is gone, so he finally tells me he'll send me an email with instructions to contact Level 2 support. I get the email the next day, but all is says is to run chkdsk again. So I call Customer Support again, go through the same stuff again, and then the guy tells me he will discuss it with his supervisor. I wait for 50 minutes before finally hanging up.
I will NEVER buy anything from Symantec again. This definitely has been my worst and most frustrating computer experience ever.
And I still haven't recovered my partition...

Be cautious using this product. I bought it becuase I needed to make my C: drive partition larger, thanks to Sony who only partitioned 15 Gig of my 40 Gig hard drive for my C: drive. Sony also created a hidden partition that wasted 5 Gig of my hardrive for recovery data instead of providing CD's. I bought the Recovery CD's from Sony so I didn't need that partition anymore. Hence, I went out and spent $69.00 on Norton Partition Magic 8.0, thinking that this would be the easiest way to give the wasted space on my hard drive back to my C: drive partition. The program installed easily and the interface was easy to understand. I had no problem deallocating the 5 Gig recovery partition. Then I tried to extend my C: drive partition using the unallocated space. I received an error message saying there was a problem with one of the sectors and Partition Magic would make no changes to my drive and close. OK, I was disappointed but no damage done, Right? Wrong! When I went to reboot I received an error message from my BIOS saying that no operating system could be found. I used the bootable Partition Magic CD to check out the problem and, to my shock and horror, found that the 15 Gig partition that had been my C: drive was now unformatted. I had basically lost everything. I didn't have the recovery disks that Partition Magic creates because Partition Magic only makes recovery disks using 3.5" floppies. Unfortunately, many notebooks, including mine, don't have floppy drives anymore and, you guessed it, I went screaming ahead without the disks that I couldn't create anyway. SO... I can't tell you if the recovery disks could have recoved my hard drive. There is no option for making a recovery CD. OK, to make my very long story short, Partition Magic was a real trooper at creating the partitions I needed as I rebuilt my hard drive from scratch. Here I sit 24 hours later with my computer finally working again....but wait, didn't I spend the $69.00 to prevent the hassle and wasted time of rebuilding my drive in the first place? Why, yes I did. So, why did I give this product 2 stars? Because I'm a generous person. And it works great partitioning and formatting an unformatted hard drive, I can vouch for that. But then again so do the free Windows utilities.

Partition magic came out around 2000 as PowerQuest Partition Magic 6.0.
In 2002 it was updated by PowerQuest to Version 8 but has not been updated since. It still looks and acts like the original version which means that it works sometimes, for certain drives. There is an update to version 8.01 that came about 4 years ago but it fails with Error '1628, Failed to complete Installation'. I have not found any info on how to get past that error.

I have built and repaired computers for many years and have used this product for 4 years, and version 6 since 2000.
Sometimes it works fine if your partition is in perfect condition. But quite often, it will not work and it just stops with one of a thousand possible errors. This includes drives and partitions that work perfectly and exhibit no symptoms of any kind. You try to copy the drive and the program errors out and stops. Usually there is no solution.

Look up "Partition Magic" error on Google,. there are about 1,200,000 results showing all the problems such as error number:

301 The file could not be opened
302 The file could not be closed
311 Unable to set the file attributes
1123 Too many references in table
1526 Directory entry too long
1532 Too few clusters
1533 Too many clusters
1534 Cluster not allocated
1535 External attribute list wrong length
1536 Nonresident attribute too short
1537 File number greater than 4 billion
1538 Can't find contiguous space to move
1619 Bad pointer in security descriptor
1652 Bad entry in external attribute list
1685 Multiple long names or links
2021 Data in the disk is not aligned as expected
2023 Data on the partition is preventing the operation

There are thousands more and often when it says it finished ok, you still end up with a drive that won't boot with no explanation why. I have certainly spent considerable time trying to get this product to work and I'd say it does work about 60% of the time.

Runnng Chkdsk /f several times will solve some errors. I backup partitions almost every week including FAT16, FAT32, and NTFS partition both old and new that are all running fine with no bad sectors and chkdsk says they are fine. But, at least 40% of the time Partition Magic (and it's partner Drive Image) just can't do it.

There are some excellent, free, Linux boot CD based utilities such as GPartedLive boot CD that work fine for most tasks including working on Windows drives. On the contrary, Partition Magic has limited support for Linux and seems unable to do even the most tasks on Unix or Linux.
It also appears to do some non-standard operations on Windows disks that you will find out about when you try to run other disk utilities.

By the way, be sure to never add a DDO (Dynamic Drive Overlay) to your disk unless you absolutely have to. That's how drive manufacturers tried to get older mainboards to recognize large disks by adding a boot sector program or overlay. Once that's installed your repair and recovery options are very limited. Nothing else can access the disk if it can't boot up by itself. That's bad. So don't use the disks that come with a new hard drive unless you read all the options carefully. Mainly don't load an overlay program, you don't need it and it will do non-standard things to your drive without much warning. Use the standard Windows/etc tools to setup your drive.

Partition Magic 8 has some good points.
It has a clear graphical interface and is easy to use.
It starts fast and gives a warning before committing changes to your drive.
It handles FAT16, FAT32 and NTFS partitions from NT, 2000 and XP (each has a different NTFS version).
And it includes the ability to make bootable floppies so you can access the main program that way.

If your partition has any hidden issues, or seemingly none at all, the program will fail and you will have to find another program to copy the drive. Their "solution" is to backup all your data, repartition and format your drive, re-install Windows and all your programs and then try their program again. Nice solution. 5 years ago, Partition Magic was updated regularly when it was maintained by the developer, PowerQuest. Then Symantec bought it and they appear to have no interest in supporting or updating products they acquire through business transactions. The bottom line is if you can get this really cheap after rebate then give it a try, it will work for most cases. But it's too outdated and fussy for regular use when you have a job to do.

There are much better products out there including those with far more features that can backup drives in realtime as you are using them, they can make a compressed image of a drive or partition for later recovery including small incremental backups, and they can backup a drive over the network or to CD/DVD, etc. Even some free programs can do that but Partition Magic can't do any of that.

I upgraded to 8.0.5, needing to do some maintenence on my boot drive, so I tried to boot from the PM floppies, but PM wouldn't run from floppy with an error 91. Going to the web site, I find that Symantec charges $30 for a tech support phone call!

I have been a fan of PartitionMagic from way back, and purchased 8.0 for a minor repartitioning of my Windows XT Pro drive. What a disaster - after several errors (my system was NOT complicated), i was barely able to get my system working again (i did this a few weeks ago so the details are fuzzy). Now i am stuck with a mysterious temp~1 directory on one of my partitions that cannot be read or deleted and appears to be consuming more disk space as i delete files - looks like i'll need to somehow re-build that partition this weekend. Stay with 7.0? That's the last one that worked flawlessly for me ... I am a lowly user and am not connected with a competitor.

Oh dear!
I've used PM since V.4 and was delighted with it until two weeks ago. Stupid me had not checked the Rescue discs and when they were required they were useless. Net result a useless PC.

Then to add insult to injury I used PM8 to partition my brand new laptop -I have a system that needs to access specific drive letters. Guess what? As is becoming increasingly common, laptops and PCs don't have floppy/frigid drives. Now, I knew my laptop didn't have one - it's pretty obvious - but I thought since I can boot from the CD drive surely I can create a Rescue disc on a CD. OH NO YOU CAN'T.

Now I'm in the predicament of having used PM, no rescue method and (apparently) no way to recover back.

It's the old adage - Buyer Beware.

Summary:

*Will not expand partition on prepartition hard drive on Sony Vaio
*Cannot undo process after the product stops at step 3 of 3, with various error codes. (They should do the checks first, then start the process, don't complete steps 1 and 2 of 3, only to stop at step 3 of 3 and leave your hard drive in "partial-complete" state.
*Will cost you 50% of your refund with Amazon (Amazon's return policy on opened software)
*Don't use Amazon's prepaid return label. They will charge you $4.98 to return item to them; you'll save 50% by returning it with own postage.

There are 2 reasons why I would not recommend this product: first the product itself:

Do not buy this product if you own a prepartition hard drive, usually from vendors like Sony, HP, Compaq etc. I owned a Sony Vaio desktop computer with 120gb hard drive purchased about 5 years ago. They prepartitioned the drive to allocate 15gb to the C: drive and the rest to the D: drive. Needless to say, over time the C: drive had only about 350 meg of space left even after deleting several seldom used programs and "cleaning" temp files. I was hoping to expand the C drive, rather than buy a new computer.

So I decided to purchase Symantic's Partition Magic, thru advise of sales person at local office product store, to increase the C: drive partition. After loading the product it asked a few questions on what I would like to do; in my case, expand the C: drive by allocating space from the D: drive; sounds easy enough, right?....wrong!!

Partition Magic starts the process; (in this case a 3 step process). It takes about 3 hours to run the first 2 steps; then an error message comes up on step 3, "too many errors on drive" or "code # ---"; when i reboot, the drive is in partially changed state, Partition Magic created an unallocated drive, so now I have 3 drives on my origial disk. I try to "undo" this, but PM wouldn't do it. I tried to run PM several times after that using different setting, NONE of them work, nor would restore my computer back.

The second reason I would not recommend this product is the return policy.

While Amazon clearly states that any "opened" software product will be returned with 50% "restock fee"; i think this is outrageous given this product doesn't work (for my computer). Worse, it couldn't even return my computer to its original state. So I spend many hours trying to get the product to work, and I end up "spending" about $30 dollars for my time and efforts. (the original cost of PM, less 50% restock and $4.98 postage)

Get this product if you want to be totally ripped off!

Norton PartitionMagic 8.0 - Create, Resize, Copy Partitions

I got this product because I like the graphical user interface, and find that it works quite well. I have been a customer ever since version 3.0 (back in the days of OS/2, multiple DOS operating systems, UnixWare, NeXTSTEP). With this one, I notice some minor glitches, because I had some removable media drives (7-in-1 USB card reader), I got errors. After rebooting, everything was fine. However, what annoys is that the product refuses to function once you install some Windows server type of OS.

I use a variety of OSes for software development and web development. I may be using Linux one moment, Windows XP another moment, or Windows 2003. However, I found that the product REFUSES to work at all with Windows 2003 installed on any partition. The software checks for it, and then refuses to install or operate. I think this artificial limitation is wholly unethical, as they want you to buy another more expensive product called ServerMagic.

Because of this programmed limitation, I will look into alternatives.