Powerquest Partition Magic 3.04 Partition Magic 3.04 Jim Fox
Every once in a while a great utility comes along. Some address very specific needs, never attracting the media hype of the large utility suites, but are still excellent products. Partition Magic is one of those products. With Partition Magic, you can create, resize and move hard disk partitions on the fly without losing data.
With the hard drive technology of today, an entry level computer comes with a minimum 2 GB hard drive. This hard drive is typically configured as one big C:> drive. The FAT (File Allocation Table) System used by DOS, Windows 3.1x and Windows 95 could be wasting up to 40% of the hard drive’s capacity. Partition Magic allows you to reclaim this wasted space.
Windows 95 OSR2 has the ability to create partitions using the new FAT32 file system. The FAT32 file system has a 4K cluster size for all supported partition sizes. There are a few programs that are not 100% compatible with FAT32, and for that reason, most computer manufacturers do not install FAT32 on their computers unless you specifically ask. Once the FAT file system is installed, there is no way to convert to FAT32 (that is a feature that will be part of Windows 98). If you have Windows 95 OSR2 and Partition Magic, you can easily convert from FAT to FAT32 and back again. You don’t have to wait for Windows 98!
Partition Magic has a very simple user interface enabling you to create, resize, format and move hard disk partitions. This same interface has the ability to display the status and structure of each partition as well as perform a host of partition and file system diagnostics. PowerQuest has gone to extreme measures in developing a quality product and to insure that no data is lost as you perform any number of different manipulations with your hard drive partitions.
Included with Partition Magic are several other utilities. MagicMover is a tool for moving applications from one drive (local, removable, or network) to another. MagicMover will also move applications to a new folder other than the folder the application was installed in originally. It saves the time of uninstalling and then reinstalling the application. DriveMapper is a wizard for Windows 3.x, Windows 95 and Windows NT that allows you to easily change drive letter references in files on your system after you have created new partitions. PartitionCopy will make an exact duplicate copy of an existing partition using available free space on the hard drive. The free space may be either on the same drive or on another hard drive. It may also be either inside or outside the extended partition. This feature works for partitions formatted for use by the FAT, HPFS, and NTFS file systems.
Partition Magic provides the ability to run multiple operating systems on the same computer. You can actually have Windows 95, Windows NT and OS/2 all installed in separate partitions and then boot from one to the other with ease. Partition Magic ships with a product called IBM Boot Manager that allows you to select which operating system to boot to each time you reboot your computer. There is also the option to use Partition Magic’s utility called PQ Boot. PQ Boot does not present a menu at boot-up, but any time you wish, you can run PQ Boot and reboot to another operating system.
This is one product that delivers exactly what it claims. Partition Magic 3.04 is simple enough for the casual computer user and powerful enough for the serious computer guru. If you own a computer with a large capacity hard drive, you need this utility!
Partition Magic has a very simple user interface enabling you to create, resize, format and move hard disk partitions. This same interface has the ability to display the status and structure of each partition as well as perform a host of partition and file system diagnostics. PowerQuest has gone to extreme measures in developing a quality product and to insure that no data is lost as you perform any number of different manipulations with your hard drive partitions.