Partition Magic

Partition Magic is a disk manipulation utility from PowerQuest that no serious PC buff should be without. In a nutshell, Partition Magic does all the things that FDISK should let you do, but doesn't, plus a lot more. This includes dynamic resizing of partitions without loss of data, changing cluster sizes, copying partitions from one disk to another, and much, much more. There's not much point in my listing all of Partition Magic's features on my site when PowerQuest has its own pages describing the product in detail. To be fair, Quarterdeck has a utility that is similar to Partition Magic, called Partition-It. I haven't used it so I can't say much about it.

The latest version of Partition Magic, 3.x, supports the FAT32 file system and is therefore greatly recommended over the older, 2.x versions. Since FAT32 was only made available in Windows OEM SR2, intended for installation on new machines by OEMs, Microsoft did not include any way to convert existing FAT16 partitions to FAT32. Partition Magic will let you do this if you use version 3.x.

Warning: A final caveat about Partition Magic--some of its operations can take a fair bit of time, such as resizing partitions or changing cluster sizes. During the time that this work is taking place, your hard disk is vulnerable to data loss in the event of a hardware or power failure. It is highly recommended that you back up your data before working on your partitions; when I am doing this sort of work, I try to make sure the PC is plugged into a UPS, just in case. This is also true of using FDISK and in fact any software that works intimately with the hard disk, but since FDISK is normally used when the disk is empty, there isn't the same concern about data loss.

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