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Paragon Partition Manager 2005 or Easeus Partition Manager for Windows XP Pro

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patteo:
I was looking through the various threads on what is a good Partition Management tool for Windows XP Pro and found that I could not get clear answer from the various threads on whether Paragon Partition Manager 2005 is a reliable tool.

Does anyone have experience with it ?

Or alternatively what about FREE EASEUS Partition Manager for Windows PC and Servers to Resize, Move, Create, Delete and Format partitions, etc.
"FREE EASEUS Partition Manager Home Edition V1.6.4"
http://www.partition-tool.com/

In fact Easeus calls itself a Partition Magic Alternative and says it's free.

Carol Haynes:
There is also Acronis Disc Director - not free but seems to work fine.

Not sure if it works on all systems but PowerQuest's Partition Manager 8 (now from Symantec) seems to work OK on my system and was the most trusted and solid partition management software out there in its day. I don't know if they have updated it since PowerQuest sold out. The last update I got from PowerQuest was version a patch to version 8.1 back in March 2003 - Symantec are still selling version 8 (no Vista version) but don't say what the version number or date is and try and get you to subscribe to a product update system for software that has seen no major development in 5+ years. I now use ADD because I hate Symantec's business approach (mainly gobble up all the best tools out there and then dump them, for their crappy stuff).

[Edit ... sorry didn't answer your direct question ... I have a freebie copy of PPM but never got round to installing it - the main thing I would say about PPM is there are loads of marketting emails from Paragon which get a bit wearing. As for Easeus I haven't tried it.]

Lutz_:
I have the bigger Paragon suite of tools ( also from the year 2005).  While they do not have an eye-pleasing design to them, they have been rock-solid, reliable, and the help files are are much more useful than the partition magic equivalents.

4wd:
I used to use Paragon Partition Manager all the time, (at least 4+ years ago), but it always seemed to create a partition table that MS chkdsk found was faulty even though the machine worked fine.  I switched to Acronis Disk Director and never had a problem.

Not saying that Paragon PM isn't a good program, just my experience at that time.

There's also the completely free GNU Parted and Ranish Partition Manager.  Both offline managers, (as opposed to Acronis and Paragon which can do some operations from within Windows), which IMO probably means there's less to go wrong since there's no OS interfering with them.

If you were going to go the free way, GNU Parted is probably the partition manager of choice.

patteo:
Thanks Carol, Lutz_ and 4wd for your responses.

Just to share the results of my little bit of experimentation.

I had just cloned a harddisk with Acronis True Image 7 (Free copy that was given away sometime ago although I read somewhere from Gizmos newsletter that Acronis True Image 8 was being given away earlier this year - probably to his paid subscribers).

As the cloned harddisk was working fine, I thought I could play around with Easeus Partition Manager for Windows 1.64 (Freeware home edition) and Paragon Partition Manager 2005.

I started with Easeus Partition Manager (no registration required but it did try to access the internet which you can disallow - no problem, just a 10 sec wait to start) and found that it worked nicely and allowed me to resize the two partitions in my harddisk quite nicely without any problems and was quite fast. I allowed me to resize by dragging the mouse cursor on the pictorial representation of the two partitions.

I didn't get around to creating or deleting a partition. But would certainly post back here on it should I get around to doing it.

I next installed Paragon Partition Manager 2005 (also a freeware) and put in the name and registration given to me.
Unfortunately, I had some trouble trying to resize my Active partition to make it bigger although I could like in Easeus Partition Manager, I could use the mouse cursor to "drag" the boundaries of my Data partition to make the Data Partition smaller.

Unfortunately, unlike in Easeus, I could not drag the boundary of my Active Partition to extend it into the "Free" unallocated space.

So for something so routine as resizing my Active Partition to make it bigger, Paragon Partition Manager 2005 was a disappointment.

Maybe, if I looked a bit deeper in the UI in Paragon, I may find that I can actually get it done.

So Thumbs up for Easeus Partition Manager for Windows 1.64 at least for me

On a slightly related subject on Acronis True Image 7.

I had actually Created an image of Drive C on a 160gb disk with two partitions with Acronis True Image 7

When I restored this Acronis Image to a 250gb, I could not get it to boot. I tried things like Fdisk /MBR as I thought perhaps the boot sector may be at a slightly different location for a 250gb but to no avail.

So I did the next most logical thing was to use the Acronis True Image 7 Clone disk command to clone my 160gb to a 250gb and this time the cloning worked flawlessly.

It is on this 250gb that I had been experimenting with Easeus Partition Manager for Windows 1.64 and Paragon Partition Manager 2005.

(Do take note that previously when I created an Acronis (v7) image of a 20gb partition (in an older laptop)  and restored it to the same partition to solve a hanging problem, the image restored properly and I could boot the laptop without any problems.)

So my conclusion is that Acronis True Images is useful only to restore to a harddisk of the same size. If it differs in size, the use the clone command.

Any differing Acronis experience any one ?

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