Best Partition Software?

sWiZzLe

sWiZzLe

sWiZzLe

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Just wondering what the best partition software for use inside windows is?

Need to partition someones drive over teamviewer to install a clean os

Cheers
 
I use PowerQuest Partition Magic. It's not free though, and most trial versions will not actually allow you to partition.
 
I have a few already like Acronis and Partition Magic, both of which have caused me problems in the past.

I may have an old version of powerquest somewhere, maybe ill give it a go, cheers
 
Inside Windows? What about inbuilt 'Disk Management' ?

I've never used it, as I prefer to perform disk operations from a 'pure' environment.


For offline use, there's http://gparted.sourceforge.net/

Just used it yesterday to blow away a couple of partitions to make room for Windows 7. The remaining two partitions ( primary 3 & 4 ) remained intact.

Free, continued development, painless.
 
Disk Management is crap in XP as far as i remember, you can create partitions, but not resize etc. Thinking about it, its pretty awful in Vista also!

Offline rather impossible across Teamviewer :/
 
Disk manager in Vista is pretty good actually. Nothing like a dedicated package but I shrunk a volume and created a new one in the space just this afternoon with no problems.
 
I've been reading good things about GParted (GParted Live CD / Parted Magic Live CD).

I'm going to attempt to resize my drive down 100GB with it so I can install Windows / programs into a separate partition. I hope it doesn't fail, because I have about 600GB of videos on the drive (I don't have enough free space on other drives to back them up) :o.

Vista's resize will only let me shrink it by 3GB, I believe this is down to the fact that it'll only let me resize until it hits system files which it won't move.
 
Pho said:
I've been reading good things about GParted (GParted Live CD / Parted Magic Live CD).

I'm going to attempt to resize my drive down 100GB with it so I can install Windows / programs into a separate partition. I hope it doesn't fail, because I have about 600GB of videos on the drive (I don't have enough free space on other drives to back them up) :o.

Vista's resize will only let me shrink it by 3GB, I believe this is down to the fact that it'll only let me resize until it hits system files which it won't move.
Click to expand...

Videos? Can you be more specific? :p

Yesterday, I tried resizing with GParted. The first pass took ages... then it started again and indicated that the second round would last 55 minutes, three times as long as the first one. :mad:

These were freshly formatted partitions, containing no data. I hate to imagine how long it would have taken to resize a full partition!

So, I just deleted the first two partitions and recreated them anew. Took seconds.

This is why you don't set up a hard disk with just one massive partition. More flexibility. ;)
 
parted magic live cd.

contains gparted and a ton of other useful tools

it's around 100mb

always backup before messing with partitions
 
eXor said:
Videos? Can you be more specific? :p
Click to expand...

MPEGs from my TV Card / archived stuff - nothing dodgy, they just takeup huge amounts of space. Oh, on second look it's only actually 479 GB :p.

I plan to leave it overnight - hopefully I don't get a powercut. Mind, I left JKDefrag running overnight and it was still going 12 hours later (though it did go over all my drives) :o.
 
Good Idea :D.

Well, I'm back from my partitioning.. 4 hours wasted and several years off my life expectancy later :o.

GParted took an hour to resize the end of my drive down by 100GB (I wish it would give a 'time left' indicator). Anyway, that apparently finished successfully so I think great. I reboot fully knowing that I'm going to have to repair Vista to get it to work but when I boot from my Vista disc it tells me no partitions are found :eek:, even bootrec didn't help. I load back up the live CD and open up GParted again, only for it to tell me the partition is corrupt (apparently the size of the partition was greater than the size of my drive). At this point I'm not best pleased!

After some Googling I found the most amazing piece of software, TestKit (bundled with the live cd as it happens). After following the guide it managed to repair the partition without problem. However, rather funnily, it repaired my partition back to its original size.

My Vista installation is now deactivated and my partitions haven't changed at all.. plan B i think :D.
 
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