Using partititon magic

demanufactured

Hiyas

Got me new pc this week
dell dimension 8400

the thing is they didnt partition the drive so im stuck with a huge 160gb drive.

me question is how safe is partition magic to use in winXP...i dont wanna reformat at the mo cos iv downloaded a few things and installed patches and stufff for games.

KdjaCL

Its fine just create a 2nd partiton and let it do its magic.


Make sure you have latest version.

kdjac

stuey

Using Partition magic - Don't!!!

Dingatron

Why not? Never had problems with it myself.

qwertz

Partition Magic (and for that matter all similar products) is fine to use in your scenario. But please do youself the favour and make sure that you have a verified backup of all data you would mind loosing before even thinking about using it. But you probably don't have many important files on it since it's a new system. I used PM numerous times without problems apart from the one time when I had a power outage and the partitions were gone beyond repair. But this was with a really old version of PM several years ago.

Don't forget to BACKUP!!!

elexes

stuey wrote:

Using Partition magic - Don't!!!

i fully support this user in his claim . ive used it a few times and its always ****ed up . everyone i know that wanted to do somthing simple with it couldnt and just ended up in causing lots of hassel .

one single big drive aint that bad anyways

NotMe

I've used Partition Magic a few times and haven't had any problems. I've used the command line FIPS loads of times aswell and it's always worked.

qwertz

Well, often the problem is between keyboard and chair.

Dingatron

Well there are certin things you shouldn't do with it but it usually tells you what the consequences of your actions will be. Backup all important files when using any partition software. I've used it for various things such as changing cluster sizes on raided disks etc. Think its a question of RTFM if your not sure about what you want to do. As said I've never had problems with it but still backup just to be sure!

Capt'n Midnight

One gotcha - if you resize the partition too much XP might decide it's a HW change and ask you to re activate or maybe not boot up at all !

I've had bad experiances with partition magic too esp. when converting NTFS back to FAT (backup / restore might be safer)
First defrag
then backup using NTBACKUP (ntbackup.msi on the XP home CD)
if you don't have a way to backup off the computer remember that about 3% of HDD's die every year.. - borrow a second HDD.

Now that you have backups you can use NTFSRESIZE on the Knoppix CD (or other linux distros) to shrink the partition to the end of the last file - because they don't move files less chance of damage I reckon.

Dingatron

qwertz wrote:

Well, often the problem is between keyboard and chair.

lol. Oh so true.

Jaeger

Can't remember what I used, probably Partition Magic but I've had only one problem with it,

that was when I split my drive into C:\ \ and E:\ a while back. Scandisk always came up with an LBA error saying something about the last cluster on drive D.....problem went away when I merged the D and E drives.

No data loss anywhere along the lines tho

demanufactured

cheers for all responses, got it done today split the drive 4 ways wihtout any glitches

stuey

i used to use it, and my succes rate with it was just sh*t. Thats why I dont recommend it. In saying that for some operations PM works fine. Its just one of those programs that claims it can do a lot of things but there a few things it just can't do right!!