Drive Splitter

[alecjw]

I've heard of a program called drive magic made by norton. It costs about £50 (sorry, I can only speak in UK English (eg. trousers zebra with the e pronounced as in bed etc) but I think that's about $80). Just out of intrest, I'm not asking anyone to write one, how easy would it be to make? is it worth £50?

[alecjw]

Actually the name is Partition Magic 8.0, it's made by symantec and i've found out the price in $. It's $69.95.

I can't see how I managed to get every single detail wrong...

[mouser]

 

[mouser]

there are other partition management tools as well, though partitionmagic is one of the best.

[Carol Haynes]

Partition Magic is now marketed by Symantec but was produced by PowerQuest and is a great piece of software. I have tried most of the parttioning tools and PM is the most effective and reliable I have found.

One word of caution though - PM hasn't been updated since 2002 (as far as I can tell Symantec haven't put out a single update since they acquired it) and drive specs have changed since then. I am not sure how it will handle the very large capacities of some modern drives, and I am not sure about its support for SATA drives. One of the things Powerquest used to do was issue updates to support new drive capacities, drive formats, bug fixes and new drive interfaces.

One of the other things PM is excellent for is upgrading hard discs as it will copy partitions from one drive to another and resize them as you want on the new drive.

The other popular partition manager I have a copy of is Acronis Disc Director, this has the advantage that it is still being actively developed however the software is Linux based and you may find some oddities in the way it handles your drives, especially if you need to run the recovery software from CDROM. I can't get the CDROM to recognise my RAID array at all, whereas PM handles it with ease from a floppy disc!

[alecjw]

Thanks for telling me about the Acronis thing. I'm trying out the free trial now.

This is completely unrelated and I should probably have started a new topic for it but I'll write it here anyway.  One mitute's silence will be held at 4:00Pm UK time (I think that's 10:00AM USA time) today to remeber the faithful paperclip which i dropped into my CRT monitor.

[mouser]

 

[nudone]

the faithful paperclip which i dropped into my CRT monitor.

that sounds like potential trouble - i hope it doesn't go bang.

[Carol Haynes]

Thanks for telling me about the Acronis thing. I'm trying out the free trial now.

This is completely unrelated and I should probably have started a new topic for it but I'll write it here anyway.  One mitute's silence will be held at 4:00Pm UK time (I think that's 10:00AM USA time) today to remeber the faithful paperclip which i dropped into my CRT monitor.

-alecjw (December 29, 2005, 09:11 AM)

Do be careful with Acronis DiskDirector - I don't quite trust it since I used it to enlarge an active partition and it scrambled my partition table slightly. I managed to recover the problem but software like this should be absolutely bombproof - unfortunately I don't find any of Acronis' software falls into this category. I also use TrueImage for backing up partitions and have found the latest release of that software to be full of bugs and problems (like for example it insists on starting scheduled backups when there aren't any scheduled - ie. it doesn't forget them when you delete).

Actually with any of these partition tools be really careful - it is very easy to completely trash your system and lose an entire drive's contents !!!

On my system I am using Partition Magic - it works for me and is dependable. My only caution (above) is relating to technology released since 2002 which doesn't apply to me as I am still using reasonable IDE drives which seem to be supported fine.

For backups I am using Genie Backup Manager Pro as my workhorse now (thanks to the DC discount page) and still using Acronis TrueImage for disc imaging though I would probably be happier using a package that I had a little more confidence in. I used to use PowerQuest V2i Protector which worked very like the Acronis product but without the bugs. Unfortunately that has died a death with the Symantec buy out and there was a single issue I could not resolve (which didn't involve data integrity).

Anyone got any other suggestions for imaging products (I don't want to buy Symantec products again - so please don't mention Ghost/Drive Image) ?

[nudone]

http://www.drive-bac...porate/professional/

i think you must have tried this one already Carol but i'll mention it anyway - it works for me (haven't had the bottle to try restoring the raid setup yet though).

http://www.drive-bac...porate/professional/

it doesn't look too pretty but i think it does everything you could want ???

[alecjw]

I don't see what you have against putting your whole hard drive in a zip archive split into volumes of just under 5GB then burning them onto some DVD-RWs

[nudone]

I don't see what you have against putting your whole hard drive in a zip archive split into volumes of just under 5GB then burning them onto some DVD-RWs

-alecjw (December 30, 2005, 05:14 AM)

does that actually work for you when restoring your operating system - i was under the impression that there are parts of the drive that would not copy under such a method (?) or at the least it would be impractical when trying to restore the drive...

how are you going to run an archive program within windows whilst actually trying to restore the partition/drive that windows is running from at the same time - it isn't going to work. or do you run your archive program from DOS or a boot disk.

[alecjw]

sorry. my brain isnt working this early in the morning- its only half past eleven...

[Carol Haynes]

I don't see what you have against putting your whole hard drive in a zip archive split into volumes of just under 5GB then burning them onto some DVD-RWs

-alecjw (December 30, 2005, 05:14 AM)

As already said it doesn't work for drive imaging.

The other problem I have is this is too CPU intensive and too slow.

One of the advantages of the new breed of imaging software is thit chugs along in the background and you can get on with things while it does.

I don't begin to understand how that can possibly work but it seems to!