Norton PartitionMagic 8.0 - Create, Resize, Copy Partitions 
Good
36
This product does what is otherwise impossible: shrinks a partition without disturbing the data therein.
Also it works very fast! It takes just a minute or two to shrink or expand a partition.<p>It has always worked for me. If you wonder why you would need this software, don't worry about it. If you need it, you know it. And when you need it, this is the only program on earth that will do this work.
When you need it and it works it is AWESOME!<p>Here's an example:
Say you have a teaching lab with 8 computers. You want to use Power Quest Drive Image to create a clone of the hard disk on computer #1 on CD. Then every Friday night after class you can restore the image on all 8 computers and Monday morning all your computers are fresh and ready, regardless of what last week's students did.<p>Computer #1 has a 100 GB hard drive in a single partition, but only 1GB is actually in use. The rest is free space. Since Drive Image backs up a partition at a time, you will need enough CDs to hold 100GB of compressed data, even though most of it will just be zeros. That might take you many CDs. What you need is a way to shrink the partition size down to just the 1GB in use. Conventional tools will not allow you to do this....they erase all the data in the partition if you shrink it. That kills you! That forces you to back up all the data to another hard drive, delete the partition, recreate the partition to the 1GB size, then format the partition, then reload the data from the spare hard drive, if possible, then create your Drive Image CD, and then go to through the whole process again to expand the partition back. This could take all day.<p>With Partition Magic, you just insert a diskette and about two minutes later you are done shrinking the partition to the needed size! Snap your image CD and then fire up Partition Magic again and in another two minutes the partition is back where it started! With this technology available doing it the old way makes about as much sense as using a Radio Shack cassette tape player for data storage on your IBM-PC instead of a hard drive.<p>The former owner of this program, Power Quest, was granted several patents on this technique. Check it out at www.uspto.gov - it's fascinating reading. Paraphrasing their words: obviously this function is not easy since it took 15 years from the introduction of the IBM-PC for someone to invent it.
0
dd56407e0004a30b169be9a4dd5bffd6
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Bad
30
Be cautious using this product. I bought it becuase I needed to make my C: drive partition larger, thanks to Sony who only partitioned 15 Gig of my 40 Gig hard drive for my C: drive. Sony also created a hidden partition that wasted 5 Gig of my hardrive for recovery data instead of providing CD's. I bought the Recovery CD's from Sony so I didn't need that partition anymore. Hence, I went out and spent $69.00 on Norton Partition Magic 8.0, thinking that this would be the easiest way to give the wasted space on my hard drive back to my C: drive partition. The program installed easily and the interface was easy to understand. I had no problem deallocating the 5 Gig recovery partition. Then I tried to extend my C: drive partition using the unallocated space. I received an error message saying there was a problem with one of the sectors and Partition Magic would make no changes to my drive and close. OK, I was disappointed but no damage done, Right? Wrong! When I went to reboot I received an error message from my BIOS saying that no operating system could be found. I used the bootable Partition Magic CD to check out the problem and, to my shock and horror, found that the 15 Gig partition that had been my C: drive was now unformatted. I had basically lost everything. I didn't have the recovery disks that Partition Magic creates because Partition Magic only makes recovery disks using 3.5" floppies. Unfortunately, many notebooks, including mine, don't have floppy drives anymore and, you guessed it, I went screaming ahead without the disks that I couldn't create anyway. SO... I can't tell you if the recovery disks could have recoved my hard drive. There is no option for making a recovery CD. OK, to make my very long story short, Partition Magic was a real trooper at creating the partitions I needed as I rebuilt my hard drive from scratch. Here I sit 24 hours later with my computer finally working again....but wait, didn't I spend the $69.00 to prevent the hassle and wasted time of rebuilding my drive in the first place? Why, yes I did. So, why did I give this product 2 stars? Because I'm a generous person. And it works great partitioning and formatting an unformatted hard drive, I can vouch for that. But then again so do the free Windows utilities.
37
This is the absolute worst piece of software I have ever bought.
I wanted to merge 2 partitions on the same drive, so I bought this software. After installing it, I ran the utility, and when my computer rebooted I got "Error 1520: External attribute header mismatch (EA3905F0)" It tells me that I need to run chkdsk /f on the D: drive, except that the D: Drive has now dissappeared, along with all the data on the drive. So I call Symantec, but hang up after 90 minutes on hold. I try again the next day, get someone in India who repeatedly tells me that I need to run chkdsk on drive D:. I tell him it's not possible as the drive letter is gone, so he finally tells me he'll send me an email with instructions to contact Level 2 support. I get the email the next day, but all is says is to run chkdsk again. So I call Customer Support again, go through the same stuff again, and then the guy tells me he will discuss it with his supervisor. I wait for 50 minutes before finally hanging up.
I will NEVER buy anything from Symantec again. This definitely has been my worst and most frustrating computer experience ever.
And I still haven't recovered my partition...
91
The box claims that the product will convert partitions on USB 2.0 drives up to 300GB. That appears to be untrue. The box also claims "Award-Winning Support". Given the complete inability to solve or even diagnose the problem on 2 different occasions, I wonder just what kind of award they won. Least capable? Most downsized?
Here's the chat transcript. You be the judge.
Vijay: Hi, thank you for contacting Symantec Live Technical Support. My name is Vijay. How may I help you?
Paul: I have just installed Partition Magic 8.05. I have a 250 GB USB drive which I want to convert from NTFS to FAT32. The convert dialog box has all the options grayed out EXCEPT turning the primary partition into a Logical partition.
Paul: Is it possible to do the conversion? (This is why I bought Partition Magic in the first place.)
Vijay: Before troubleshooting any further, I need to gather some more information from you. May I proceed?
Paul: Sure
Vijay: Thank you.
Vijay: Did you partition the drive into small partitions?
Paul: No. It is one partition.
Vijay: Is it external drive or internal drive?
Paul: By the way, I called on Friday and someone tried to figure this out and was supposed to call back. They never did.
Paul: The case number is <nnn>. External drive. Maxtor. USB. 250 GB
Vijay: Can you please be on hold while I refer to the documents. This may take 2-3 minutes.
Paul: Sure
Vijay: Thank you.
Vijay: Thank you for being online.
Vijay: Paul, does the Partition Magic options are enabled in other internal drives?
Paul: Yes, it is enabled for the internal drive.
Paul: The box claims that it works for USB 2.0 drives, which is what this one is.
Vijay: How many internal hard drives do you have installed in your computer?
Paul: It's a notebook computer. There is 1 internal hard drive (100 gb). And there is 1 external USB hard drive (250 gb). The USB drive is directly connected to the computer (no hubs or anything like that).
Vijay: How many partitions are there in internal hard drive?
Paul: one
Paul: Computer is running WinXP Home
Paul: Drive is not compressed, encrypted or anything else strange.
Vijay: What is the file system of the internal harddrive?
Paul: NTFS
Vijay: Is the create partition option enabled for external drive?
Paul: There are 2 panels on the screen. The top one, labeled "Pick a task..." has a task labeled "Create a new partition" and it is available.
Paul: The lower panel, labeled "Partition Operations" has an entry labeled "Create Partition" which is GRAYED OUT.
Paul: Same menu availability for both the internal and external drives.
Vijay: Do you get the option Convert when you right click on the external hard drive?
Paul: Yes. And it pops up a dialog box with everything UNAVAILABLE except "logical partition".
Paul: If I do the same thing on the internal drive, I DO have the option to convert to FAT32.
Vijay: Does the external drive is labelled as 'Unallocated' ?
Paul: Not sure what you mean.
Vijay: Do you see the external hard drive in Partition Magic console is marked as unallocated or written as unallocated in it?
Paul: No. It's all NTFS.
Vijay: Alright.
Paul: MAXTOR250 (E:) NTFS 239,366.9
Vijay: This issue could be due to size of the Harddrive. I suggest that you diveide the hadrdrive by creating a new partition in it and then try to convert both partitions.
Paul: That won't work for me. The whole point here was to mount the drive on a wireless router. I believe that it only recognizes a single partition.
Paul: The Partition Magic box claims that it works on partitions up to 300 GB and on USB drives.
Paul: This one's only 250 GB. It's less than 35% used.
Paul: There are no open files that I know of.
Paul: Is there a way to force all files closed on the drive?
Paul: (Other than "Remove Hardware" which would keep Partition Magic from seeing it too.)
Vijay: Converting the file system will delete all the data that is present on the drive.
Paul: Not according to the documentation.
Paul: I'm not trying to reFORMAT the drive. I'm trying to convert it.
Paul: And again, the box claims "Converts partitions among FAT, FAT32, and NTFS without losing data."
Paul: Vijay: Is there second line support available? I'd like this to get escalated. Thanks.
Vijay: There may be chances of losing the data. it is recommended to backup the data before converting teh file system.
Paul: Of course.
Paul: Please connect me to the second line support people. Thanks
Vijay: Can you please be on hold while I refer to the documents. This may take 2-3 minutes.
Paul: Vijay: Are you unable to escalate this incident?
Vijay: Thank you for being online.
Vijay: You will be getting an email within 24 hours, if I escalte the issue to my supervisor. Is that OK with you?
Paul: Vijay: I logged the request on Friday. I was supposed to get a call back THAT DAY. No call on Friday. No call on Saturday. No call on Sunday.
Vijay: Are you getting the option to convert the partition to Logical while you select convert option?
Paul: Now you've tried to solve the problem and were unable to resolve it.
Paul: I'd like someone to work on this problem NOW.
Vijay: I promise you that you receive a mail within 24 hours.
Paul: Yes. As I said at the beginning "LOGICAL" is the only choice available in that dialog box.
Paul: Vijay. I have no reason to doubt you personally, but quite frankly Symantec is 0 for 1 right now on follow through and 0 for 2 on problem solving. I'd like to get this problem solved today.
Vijay: In order to convert the partition to FAT32, you can take a backup of the drive and format the drive and select File system as FAT32.
Paul: Sure. And I can drive over it with my car and go buy a new drive formatted with FAT32. I bought Partition Magic so that I wouldn't have to do that.
Vijay: I apologize for the inconvenience caused.
Paul: Thanks for the apology. But let's solve the problem.
Paul: You do have supervisors there today, don't you?
Vijay: As the supervisors are busy with resolving the other escalated issues, you would receive a mail within 24 hours.
Paul: Well, since my request is now 48 hours old, seems like I ought to be right at the top of the queue, doesn't it?
Vijay: Please note taht we do not have access to records of Voice support. Since you have contacted Chat support now with the issue, you will receive a mail within 24 hours, or you can get back to us through Chat.
Paul: Ok Vijay. Send me the email. I'll be waiting.
97
I remember Powerquest Partition Magic 2.0, back in the days when it was released as an OS/2 *and* MS-DOS utility you could boot and use from a set of two diskettes. I got hands-on experience with Partition Magic up to version 7, in my view their "last good" version (the best was version 3.0).
Slowly they started dropping features over time, like HPFS file system support, for no apparent reason (hey: there are some NT4 systems still running on HPFS to this day!).
Soon after version 8 was released, the corporation dubbed Symantec -which I like to refer to as "Engulf and Devour"- bought powerquest and while I no longer used it, soon I started hearing the complaints about the new "activation scheme" in version 8.x, which insisted on "phoning home" before allowing you to use it.
To boot, when I went to powerquest.com looking for an update that I know was there before the buyout by Symantec for my Partition Magic 7 product, I was redirected to the Symantec.com web page. But when you click on "other versions", you're quickly told that all Powerquest products (that is, any partition magic version < 8) are "obsolete" and "unsupported". They got rid of all the updates for PQMagic versions 3 to 7. Obviously Symantec is only interested in new sales and the dollars, not supporting former Powerquest customers (Partition Magic 7.0 is even listed and in stock for sale on Amazon.com!).
PQMagic and Powerquest Drive Image have been always superior to Symantec's Ghost products. Yet now Symantec bundles the inferior Norton Ghost in a bundle with Partition Magic 8.
It's sad to see such a great company and their products destroyed by Symantec's corporate greed. Welcome to the Symantec partition resizing utility monopoly!. Symantec got rid of their main competitor and destroyed a product in the process. It's just sad. For a good partition resizer check out V-Com's Partition Commander, and for disk imaging, I now use Acronis TrueImage. Both are for sale here in Amazon.com. Check those out before giving your money to the Symantec juggernaut.
0
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