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

[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 ?

[4wd]

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.

-patteo (July 23, 2008, 12:03 AM)

It might be different with earlier versions of True Image, (I only used from v9 on I think), but when you restore a bootable partition it normally asks if you want to restore the partition or the MBR.

I haven't had any problems restoring bootable partitions to HDs of different sizes.

Also, what you probably wanted to do was to boot into Recovery Mode off of an XP CD, (assuming XP is what you were using), and run BOOTCFG /scan to locate all Windows installations and then BOOTCFG /add to add them into boot.ini so ntldr can boot it.

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.

To tell the truth, I usually completely forget TI has a clone option and usually just backup/restore to another drive.

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 ?

As per above, I haven't had a problem restoring to different size HDs, although I am using TI v11 currently.  I also always use the 'Restore disks and partitions' option not 'Sector by sector restore of disks and partitions'.

[Armando]

I haven't had any problems restoring bootable partitions to HDs of different sizes.

-4wd (July 23, 2008, 05:36 AM)

usually just backup/restore to another drive.

-4wd (July 23, 2008, 05:36 AM)

Same here.

[OldElmerFudd]

Hmmm...I own True Image 7, 8, and 10. For partitioning and imaging drives, I've never found anything better suited for my purposes, free or paid. Never had any trouble with any drive, either. Go figure.
 

[tomos]

Hmmm...I own True Image 7, 8, and 10. For partitioning and imaging drives, I've never found anything better suited for my purposes, free or paid. Never had any trouble with any drive, either. Go figure.
 

-OldElmerFudd (August 27, 2008, 04:08 PM)

but true image doesn't partition (.. or does it?)

[cloudy123]

 , both of them are good. I know EASEUS Partition Manager Home Edition is free for home users,so it is cheaper than Partition Manager. Right?

[commer]

  Not konw much about Paragon...I always use EASEUS Partition Manager.  Its newest version can support Windows Vista now.

[PhilB66]

, both of them are good. I know EASEUS Partition Manager Home Edition is free for home users,so it is cheaper than Partition Manager. Right?

-cloudy123 (August 29, 2008, 02:26 AM)

Not konw much about Paragon...I always use EASEUS Partition Manager.  Its newest version can support Windows Vista now.

-commer (September 28, 2008, 10:43 PM)

Smells like

[jgpaiva]

It does sound fishy, Phil.. The first person that posted didn't come back after giving that advice.
Honestly, this'd be a good reason for me to decide for another product.

PS: I'll leave the moral decision of removing or not removing the posts to mouser.

[patteo]

It does sound fishy, Phil.. The first person that posted didn't come back after giving that advice.
Honestly, this'd be a good reason for me to decide for another product.

-jgpaiva (September 29, 2008, 05:33 AM)

Perhaps it may be spam. But as for being a good reason to decide for another product, I think I won't do that.

The reason is that I tried the Giveawayoftheday "EASEUS Partition Manager Professional Edition 2.0 just today because I'm setting up a new laptop and it worked pretty well for me.

EASEUS Partition Manager is comprehensive hard disk partition software, which not only provides with convenient user-interface simplifying your tasks but also enables you to configure and manage partitions of hard drive."
http://www.giveawayo...ager&x=0&y=0


Unfortunately, I cannot say I had the same result with the venerable Partition Magic which had served me well previously.

Anyway, the Easues Patrition Manager Home edition (which is free) and the Pro version has only a few differences pertaining to ability to work on 64bit and on commercial environments.

So I say if you are having some problems with other Partition Managers, then try the free Easues Partition Manager Home edition. Of course you may just want to test on on a non critical harddisk.

Anyway, I cannot say I have a vast amount of experience with Easues Partition Manager. But so far so good - and you cannot really argue with "Free and it works".