Avanquest’s Partition Commander Professional 10, despite its name, is actually ideal for the eager novice as well as the professional. The users manual is detailed and describes all the ins and outs of partitioning, including what physically happens to the drives and how file systems work, all with handy charts, text, and graphs. You can find most of what you need to know about working with your hard drives in this users manual.

One issue with this software is that it takes a long time to perform some operations. After you tell the program to perform an operation, the computer restarts and performs the chosen operation during the boot process. In the meantime, you can do nothing but wait. If you try to interrupt the process, you run a very real risk of corrupting the hard drive.

There is plenty to like about Partition Commander Professional, though. For one thing, it offers users an astonishing smorgasbord of specific file types to choose from when formatting a partition, including NTFS (NT file system), FAT32 (file allocation table 32), Linux Ext2 (Second Extended file system), Linux Ext3, Linux ReiserFS, and a long list of others. Further, every operation has a handy, easy-to-use wizard to guide you. Many operations require little more than a simple click-and-drag to resize a hard drive partition.

There are several options for partitioning and related tasks. Beyond the basics such as creating, deleting, and resizing a partition, Partition Commander Professional allows you to perform such operations as cloning partitions or the entire hard disk for creating back-ups of operating systems or data.

You can also choose to have Partition Commander Professional check the drives or partitions you’re about to alter and even determine the depth to which the scan delves. In short, Partition Commander Professional offers a nice selection of both basic and advanced options for creating and managing hard drive partitions.

EASEUS Partition Master Home Edition 3

You don’t always get what you pay for; EASEUS Partition Master Home Edition 3 is free, but it would certainly be worth buying. Installation is a snap: Just a few clicks through a setup wizard, and then you can get cracking on creating and managing partitions on your computer.

Partition Master Home Edition is not a fancy program, and the relatively spare interface reflects it. It’s easy and intuitive to use, and many of the operations are graphical in nature. If you need more info about a partition, just click it to see what is on it. That is, you can actually look through the files and folders present on that partition, which is a smart feature that can help you keep all your partitions straight if you have more than one or two.

Creating or resizing a partition is as easy as selecting a partition, clicking Create Partition or Resize/Move Partition on the menu on the left side of the window, and clicking and dragging to select the new partition sizes. But if you’d rather, you can enter specific numbers to select the size of the partitions, as well. Of course, if you’re creating a partition from scratch, you’ll first need to enter information such as the name of the partition, the drive letter, and which file system format to use.

With Partition Master Home Edition, you can also choose the Active partition (that is, the one that the computer boots from) with just a couple of mouse clicks through a menu. Partition Master Home Edition also features some advanced features such as the ability to run error checks, which is valuable if you have any problems on your computer.

Paragon Partition Manager 10 Personal

Paragon’s Partition Manager 10 Personal is a seriously powerful piece of software with many capabilities beyond simply partitioning hard drives. You can either order an installation disc or purchase and download the software directly from Paragon’s Web site; the latter is a convenient option if you don’t want to wait to install and use the software.

If you want to try it before you buy it, you can download a demo version. The demo lets you see how the software works and what it offers but has limited capabilities. Either way, installation is quick and easy.

You can create, resize, merge, and delete partitions with Partition Manager 10 Personal, but you can also perform a number of other operations, including copying and migration, Mac-related operations, backup tasks, and boot management.

With those tools, you can migrate an entire hard drive to a new location or copy a whole partition, resize partitions containing Mac OS X and Windows operating systems, back up your system or specific data, create a bootable recovery CD, set up boot parameters for your system, or install a new operating system.

All operations use convenient and easy-to-follow wizards, so you shouldn’t ever find yourself baffled by the software. A nice bonus is that the available views of your partitions let you see all the files and folders on each, so you can browse a partition to make sure all the data is backed up before you perform an operation.

Disk Management

Although it’s not especially exciting, it’s worth mentioning in this head-to-head that there is a disk management utility built right into your Windows Vista operating system. The utility is fairly simple to use and is correspondingly somewhat under-featured. There is a similar disk management utility for Windows XP, but in this case we’re focusing specifically on Vista.

To access Disk Management, click Start, Control Panel, and System And Maintenance. Within the System And Maintenance window, click Administrative Tools and double-click Computer Management. In the resulting window, click Disk Management under the Storage heading.

The Disk Management utility provides the user with a fair amount of information on each volume (also known as a “partition”), such as the drive letter, size of the partition, its health (such as whether or not it contains corrupted files), and more.

To perform an action, click the partition you want to alter, select Action from the menu, and select the operation you wish to perform. Options include changing the letters and drive paths, formatting, extending or shrinking volumes, and deleting volumes. Those possibilities are essentially the extent of Disk Management’s usefulness, although that may be all you need it for.

Symantec Norton Partition Magic 8.0

Strike one for Norton Partition Magic 8.0 from Symantec? It doesn’t support Windows Vista, and Norton has no plans to upgrade the software accordingly. And that’s a big strike, removing it as a viable option for a large number of PC users. Another negative is that the software only lets you choose FAT, FAT32, and NTFS formats. (According to Symantec, Partition Magic also supports Ext2 and Ext3, but we weren’t able to find these formats in the software.) But if you aren’t yet a Vista user and only need the most common options for file formatting, you’ll find this software useful.

When you first install the software, you’ll be prompted to make rescue diskettes. Basically, you can create a bootable diskette and one that can run Partition Magic. This is helpful if your hard drive has an issue and you need to fix it without working from the hard drive itself.

Norton Partition Magic also comes with some extra applications, such as Boot Magic, which is a utility that helps you run multiple operating systems on the same computer.

Although the GUI (graphical user interface) isn’t especially pretty, it’s intuitive to use. For example, the Browse Partition function lets you look through the files and folders on the partition in question and save anything you may have forgotten to earlier. Anybody can pick up how to use this function easily.

All of your options for working with partitions are listed under Pick A Task in the main window. Every task uses a wizard; the wizards all have essentially the same steps in the same order (with some differences, of course, pertaining to what you’re trying to accomplish). Because of the consistency, performing multiple tasks has a low learning curve.

Before you enact an operation, you can click Tips in the Confirm Choices window, and a Help menu will appear. It’s quite detailed.

by Seth Colaner

Product Information Chart Product Price Company Contact Info URL Notable features Systems Supported Disk Management Free Microsoft (800)642-7676 www.microsoft.com Built into the Windows operating system Vista 32-bit & 64-bit Partition Commander Professional 10 $49.95 Avanquest (800)395-6682 www.avanquest.com Huge selection of file formats available 2000/XP/Vista 32-bit Partition Magic 8.0 $69.95 Symantec (408)517-8000 www.symantec.com Includes extra built-in software 98/Me/2000/XP Partition Manager 10 Personal $39.95 Paragon (888)347-5462 www.paragon-software.com Offers much more than basic partitioning capabilities 2000/XP/Vista/7 32-bit & 64-bit Partition Master Home Edition 3 Free EASEUS Online only www.partition-tool.com Easy and intuitive to use 2000/XP/Vista 32-bit Buying Tips • In some cases, you may find that the built-in Windows partitioning utility is all you need, but you can be confident that a third-party application will have more features available. • Make sure the partitioning software you acquire supports your operating system. Not every single one supports Vista or Mac OS X, for example. • If you’re in a bind and can’t wait for your software to arrive in the mail, you can simply download some software when you purchase it.  User Reviews Be the first to write a review of this product

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