Partition Magic 8.0

PowerQuest's technicians are polite and responsive but don't actually have a solution to this. Their only patch is from version 8.0 to 8.01 - which most buyers, me included, will already have. Running ckdsk /f as recommended by the technicians also doesn't work - and most people would have done this before attempting any partitioning work in any case.

The fact is, for some of you out there, Parition Magic won't work. This is poor from a well-known company who shouldn't make claims about XP compatibility that they can't uphold. After extensive web searches (e.g. check out the reviews on Amazon.com, rather than .co.uk - they seem to give a good overall picture) I have discovered that I am not alone. This saga seems to have happened to many people trying to use PM8 with XP.

No partitioning program is perfect, and some are frankly lethal, so I will hang onto this one in the hope that PowerQuest come up with a suitable patch. I would advise potential buyers who have recent Win XP systems to wait for the next version and/or keep a sharp eye on web reviews rather than risk splashing out on something that might be useless to them.

If you want to partition your hard drive, install multible OS, this is the program for you, however BEWARE. Partition Magic 8 has worked well for me, and is preety good. As claimed, it can be used to resize, copy, make, merge, etc partitions, which it does well. I have successfuly used it, however there have been problems, which have easily been fixed, but requiring time!

The graphical interface is super, and it is easy to use. Unfortunately wizards dont work if you have a reiser fs linux partition, but ext2 work. If you are a new user, you will quickly learn how to use this product. The drivemapper software easily allows you to change drive letters, if you need to.

There are some utilities that come with the program. Diskeeper can be used to make backups of the drive, although I didn't use it as cd and ither backup media are too expensive. The other utility is BootMagic. This is functional but extremely ugly, and thus I dont use it, but use Grub instead.

As for problems, there are two annoying problems I have experianced. One causes windows to load but crash before the boot screen, which can be fixed by repairing windows with the windows XP setup, and no data is lost! Another problem is in linux! Partition magic doesn't update the FStab file, which has to be done manually, but that's ok for linux experts.

In conclusion, I would say that Partition Magic is an excelent utility for partitioning hard drives, however there is plenty of room for imporvement. If you want to partion, go buy it, but take CARE!

I noticed one of the reviewers referred to this software as a one-trick pony, and I can see how that would be true in the majority of cases. But I could no longer live without it. I use it very frequently as I am constantly needing to add and reassign disk space, and I do a fair bit of mucking about with different OS's.

As for the errors ppl have reported finding with winXP, the only thing I can say is that I've never seen a single one in over 3 months. Maybe it has to do with the fact that I always make sure my disks are in good condition before I do anything? I always run a diskchk and defrag before starting, and have never had any problems.

Overall, the best :D.