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Partition Managers Review

Review of Disc Partition Manager and Backup Products

Why use a Disc Partition Manager?

Partition Managers set up and manage multiple partitions on your hard disc drive(s), such that they appear to the operating system as multiple drives: D: E: and so on.

This enables you to keep the operating system (eg Windows), drivers, Program_Files and related settings on C:, whilst having all your data, My Documents etc on the D: drive. You might then have another drive E: for media such as video or photos.

All this vastly simplifies backup, recovery, migration to a new computer and sharing files over a network.

You can have primary, extended and logical partitions on the same hard disc drive, but I am not going to go into that here. See The PC Guide for a tutorial.

Partition Manager Software

Recommended

Paragon Partition Manager 10 Personal

(£25.95 inc VAT) Good, fixed my corrupt partition the others were not able to. Good value, recommended.

Paragon Backup and Recovery Free Edition 10.1

Hard to find on their site, but it does exist. Includes Recovery Media Builder, which not all products do. Excellent product.

OK, but not so good?

EASEUS Partition Master Home Edition (free) and EASEUS Partition Master Pro, $39.95, or free demo version.

OK, but not as effective as the Paragon products in recovering a corrupt partition for me. The Home Edition will not create a bootable recovery CD, and lacks other functions, see Product Comparison.

Acronis Partition Expert

Part of the Disc Director Suite; another trial version that will not commit.

Acronis True Image Home £39.95 - seems to be one of the best backup and recovery package around. It works with partition images and supports cloning, as well as more normal file backup and restore. But there is a learning curve, not for casual users.

Too Risky, Best Avoided?

Cute Partition Manager (Freeware)

This has mixed reviews, and seems to have a command line interface. This is dangerous if you do not know what you are doing. And it cannot merge or resize existing partitions. Avoid.

Windows Disc Management

(Start | All Programs | Administrative Tools | Computer Management | Disc Management). This does simple tasks only, and may be enough, but assumes a fair level of knowledge and so is risky.

Norton / Symantec Partition Magic 8.0

The original, by PowerQuest, bought by Symantec in 2003, used by me for years, but it now seems to have been swallowed up by Other Norton Products. [Does anybody remember Dr Norton's DOS utilities?]. No longer recommended.

Other Comments

It is understandable that many suppliers provide demo software that cannot actually make any changes, since most people will only want to use such software every year or so.

Using this software is potentially risky, and can destroy your system if there is a fault in the program or an ill advised user intervention. So it is probably worth paying for software with an intuitive graphical interface from a reputable suppler.

For myself, I have moved to using the Paragon Products.

Boot Manager

For my next PC I shall want at least dual boot (XP and Vista), so I shall need to go into the comparative strengths of the boot managers bundled in with the better partition managers mentioned above. So this will become the deciding factor.

Virtual Machine Software

OR you can use virtual machine software which enables simultaneous running of more than one operating system and its windows on one machine, with automatic switching between them, such as:

• VMware, the market leader? Free server version, $189 workstation.
• Windows XP Mode and Windows Virtual PC, available on Windows 7 Professional and Windows 7 Ultimate, allow you to run multiple Windows environments, such as Windows XP Mode, from your Windows 7 desktop.
• Windows Virtual PC 2007 supports Vista and XP, but is not needed for Windows 7.
• VirtualBox, Open Source, looks good.

This market is currently driven by the significant benefits of consolidating multiple virtual machines on one server in corporate environments.

Afterword

One of my clients had a need to transfer all her data files from a very old Windows 98 PC to a newish refurbished DELL from re-boot. The old machine had no USB port or CD drive, so I took the whole drive out of the old machine to fit into the old, but there was no space in the box for a permanent installation.

So the smart thing was to setup a second partition on the new PC's drive and copy the whole of the old drive into that. Which led me into research on the Partition Manager market as above.