Today's technology changes have made hardware faster and cheaper. Hard drives
are one of the best examples of these changes. Only about six or seven years ago, a 1.7 GB
drive would cost you over $1,000. Today, you can find drives in the 14 GB range for less
than $400. Some people have found that the increased storage gives them the ability to try
out multiple operating systems or to take the opportunity to make multiple partitions into
one (or vice versa). Moving partitions, or changing the type of partition from FAT to
FAT32 or HPFS (for OS/2) or NTFS (for Windows NT) used to mean moving all of your data to
another drive and reformatting the drive. Companies saw this opportunity to make it
easier, and PartitionMagic by PowerQuest Corporation is among the best known.
I had the opportunity to try
PartitionMagic out on a system I had sitting idle. The drive was set for multiple FAT
partitions since 2.2 GB was the largest you could use in a partition until FAT32, HPFS,
and NTFS came along. The interface for the software is simple--you tell the software what
steps you want to take, and the software makes a list of those changes. When you have it
set up the way you want, then you just tell the software to apply the changes. It really
isn't much harder than this--I proved it by taking my first run at this without even
opening the manual! When you do open the manual, you find out that there are a lot of
options you can apply along the way, and a few cautions.
These cautions are in the form of
warnings that if you change a partition to HPFS and don't have OS/2 on your system, you
won't be able to access the data on that partition. If you don't have a software package
that supports FAT32 (such as Windows 95b or Windows 98) you will have the same problem.
The same applies for NTFS--in fact, to make the change from FAT to NTFS you have to be
running Windows NT on your system, as the software invokes the Microsoft Convert utility.
This is one of the few limitations of the software.
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Now that you've worked on your hard drive, you may have decided to have
multiple operating systems. How are you doing to handle this? Well, packaged with
PartitionMagic is BootMagic. This utility lets you select which operating system (and
thus, which partition) to use for that session on your system. This is one of those
utilities that make the package really work. I've seen some companies that have marketed
the two types of products separately in the past, and I like it when a company really
makes it possible for the end user to really use a package.
Also included in the software are
two utilities called MagicMover and DriveMapper. The first one lets you move an
application from one partition to another and automatically update references in the
operating system, and the other lets you map the drives in the order you want them, not
the way the defaults say it should be.
As has been said in other
reviews, the licensing agreement for products from PowerQuest are usually set for you to
use on drives attached permanently to one computer. This means you can't just
hook up a drive and work on it to put on another system, or to use the software on
multiple computers. There are other licensing options that cover this at least in part for
those who work in a company that needs to make changes on many systems. This is really
along the lines of how other companies license their software. You may not be in
agreement, but the company does have a right to set their licensing. If you don't agree
with it, then don't buy it. If you're in a business to work on computers, then the
additional costs of licensing are a part of the business.
My impressions? I like it! This
software really did what I needed, did it quickly (one of the ideas they have
emphasized in some of their earlier advertising). It has more power than most people will
need, but there is always a power user somewhere who will desperately need one of the
applications.
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