PartitionMagic: Hard Disk Management Made Easy

Few utilities become indispensable after you use them a few times.They usually do only one thing or a few things extremely well. One of my newestfavorite utilities is PartitionMagic from PowerQuest. Version 2.0 has someunique abilities, including the ability to change the size of a disk partitionwithout destroying the data. With this utility, you can split a 1.2GB partitioninto, say, a 600MB and two 300MB partitions.

Why is this such a big deal? Well, because a FAT partition can have only64K directory entries, the size of a cluster (the minimum addressable unit ofthe disk) keeps increasing. A 1.2GB partition has a cluster size of 32,768bytes. If you have small file, say a 500-byte mail message, the file stilloccupies one cluster, with 32,268 bytes of wasted space. Put this file on a300MB partition, with a cluster size of only 8,096 bytes, and you recover 28,672bytes. If you do this for a large number of files, you will see a lot of freedisk space you never knew you had. With PartitionMagic, you can do so withouthaving to run FDISK and then reinstall your software.

OK, so you already partition your disks to avoid large cluster sizes. Butwhat about that new computer you just bought? The one that was delivered withthe 2GB drive, formatted as one partition, with 32K clusters? Or even worse, a2.1GB drive with 64k clusters? You decide to repartition the disk into smallerlogical drives. But you do not want to run FDISK on it, because that takes time.Besides, the computer has all that pre-installed software--you have thesoftware on the hard disk but no floppies or CD-ROM from which to re-install. Inthis case, you'll find PartitionMagic useful, just for the time it saves you.

In addition to resizing partitions, PartitionMagic can also create, remove,and format partitions, as shown in Screen A. You can use PartitionMagicto hide and unhide partitions, if you wish to boot to different operatingsystems. OS/2 users can create room for Boot Manager using PartitionMagic.

Version 2.0 of PartitionMagic understands FAT, NTFS, High Performance FileSystem (HPFS), NetWare, and Linux volumes. It runs under DOS: PartitionMagicwill run under Windows 3.1 or 95, but to change the disk configuration, you haveto boot to a DOS prompt. And the product runs under OS/2. Unfortunately, thecurrent version does not run under NT, so you have to boot to a DOS prompt.PowerQuest is working on a new version, due this month, that will run under NTand understands the FAT32 file system. The company promises major enhancementsfor NT users. Look for a review of version 3.0 in an upcoming issue of WindowsNT Magazine.