alternatives to partition magic/paragon?

[f0dder]

Never use partitioning programs for anything else but delete/create - never resize partitions, it's a recipe for disaster... PartitionMagic always worked fine for me in the past, but there's just too much room for disaster.

But yeah, it sucks having to backup all that data just to do a minor resize.

[Carol Haynes]

I really wouldn't recommend trusting any Acronis product for managing partitions. I had a big catastrophe today when I tried to use the Acronis HDD boot function (the one that offers to show a True Image screen on boot so you can run recovery right off the HDD).

It tried to create a partition, failed and abruptly exited. When I logged on to Windows all the partitions seemed to be in place but Windows prompted me to reboot coz "changes had been made". After reboot compmgmt showed me that a small partition (unlettered/ unused space) had indeed been created. A peep via partition magic showed the whole disk merged into one "bad" partition! I tried to allocate the unused space back via compmgmt and boom! it exits with an error and the free space has been merged with two of my logical data drives, making them both unusable. I know people don't think very much of PMagic but it was the only app that recognised that things had been badly fxxxed up.

I managed to get everything back, thanks to most of it being mirrored daily on another HDD and a gem of a utility called 'Find and Mount', free for home use. It lived up to its name and found both lost partitions and the chunk of unallocated space. It let me mount both partitions to their respective drive letters and I'm moving data to my other HDD as I type this. The free version lets you read data off the mounted drives at 512 KB/s, it'll take me half a day yet to get everything out of there but I'm not complaining, this thing saved my ass.

Partition Find and Mount - highly recommended! Acronis for partitioning, NOT!

One thing I'd like to add is, whatever tool you're using for partitioning, if it's not screwing up, stick to it! Managing partitions via multiple apps really seems like a bad idea.

-nosh (October 07, 2007, 06:33 PM)

I also had a partition disaster a while back after Partition Magic told me that a parameter was wrong and tried to fix it - thus rendering about 8 partition inaccessible with a "Bad Partition Table" error.

It's a pain backing up, but ... before you do anything to partition tables get a backup of the whole drive.

I found "Partition Table Doctor" a real life save a few times now. OK it isn't free but it does a number of useful things:

• Can be run from Windows or booted directly from a Rescue CD if Windows won't boot
• Scans a drive to check partition table consistency
• If problems arise it finds all the old partition table data (even from a number of partition generations back) which can be really useful if your PT gets hosed
• BEST: It has a backup and restore function of the Partition Table data. This is really good - if the partition table is damaged you can instantly restore it - you just need to remember to get a new backup every time you make partition changes.

[Armando]

Managing partitions via multiple apps really seems like a bad idea.

-nosh (October 07, 2007, 06:33 PM)

That's been my experience too. Have absolutely NO idea why. Aren't there some standards????

[Darwin]

I'm late to this discussion, but thought I'd post this link to Partition Logic, which is a free alternative to the likes of both Partition Magic and Ghost. I've not tried it, but it's been well received over at Power Tools Software. Another free alternative that has been recommended is GParted.

My only experience is with Partition Magic 8 (paid $70 for it and have had no real problems with it) and Paragon Partition Manager 2005 (free from www.vunet.co.uk) which has actually bailed me out a few times in situations that Partition Magic couldn't help me with...

[blackcat]

Yep - I knew about that reg key

Does any one know a way to move the whole user profile to a different partition,

eg. move C:\Documents and Settings\Carol and everything in it (including the user profile files etc)

to D:\

-Carol Haynes (October 02, 2007, 03:12 PM)

yes..it's possible actually..right now both my "doc & settings" folder and "program files" folder are located on the second partition, D: while my \windows folder is on partition, c:

there are 2 ways of doing that..either using junction point(ntfs only) or use nlite to create customize xp setup and specify those 2 folder's new path..

[argv]

I'm using GParted: http://gparted.sourc...forge.net/livecd.php

Regards

[iphigenie]

I have the vcom partition manager and it has served me well. Switched to it when partition magic let me down, simply because vcom had a special at the time. It comes with boot manager etc.

I just bought the paragon "disk manager" (on special, 49.99 for 3 licenses) and it looks pretty good. Contains a partition manager, partition backup tool and boot manager and supposedly some defrag function. I had never really tried their tool and on first look it looks pretty good - comes with restore CDs images both for normal windows but also for the corporate recovery options. I went to the site interested in the backup tool but when i saw this on special I bought this. Will post notes when I have tried some more.