Manage Your Hard Drive Partitions

Those of you who use dual-boot PCs typically need a way to manage the different operating system partitions on your hard drive. Sometimes you have to create, delete, or resize a partition. Other times you may want to merge or split partitions. That's when a partition manager comes into play.

Windows does offer its own Disk Management utility and a command line tool called Diskpart. Both let you create, delete, and in some cases resize partitions. But Disk Management and Diskpart are limited in their capabilities. You'll find more features, functionality, and ease of use in a good third-party partition manager.

A variety of partitioning programs are on the market-some free, some paid. One of my favorite partitioning programs was PartitionMagic. It offered a healthy set of features and was relatively user-friendly. But Symantec (News - Alert) bought the software several years ago, didn't seem to know what to do with it, and ended up killing the product. Thanks a lot, Symantec!

Since PartitionMagic's demise, I've tried a few other partitioning tools and thought it'd be helpful to go over your options if you do need such a program, either at home or on the job.

You can find free partitioning software online, but such products are typically geared for home use, so they're not the best options for a corporate environment-their licenses also generally restrict you from use in an enterprise setting. Plus, the freebies handle only client operating systems, so you can't use them to manage a partition running a server OS. And in some cases, the free ones only support 32-bit operating systems.

The paid commercial products are more versatile, letting you run them on your network PCs at work and fully supporting 64-bit operating systems. Several vendors sell specific editions for Windows Server. Many offer free versions for basic needs and paid versions for more advanced requirements.

Here are a few of the products I've tried and that I think are worth checking out.

Partition Wizard from MT Solutions is a free product geared for home use. You can create, delete, resize, copy, and move partitions. You can convert a partition from one file system to another, e.g., from FAT to NTFS. Partition Wizards even supports RAID arrays and 64-bit operating systems. Wizards take you step-by-step through a variety of tasks, including copying a partition, copying or backing up your hard drive, and recovering a partition you've deleted. The software also lets you check the file system and the surface of the disk for diagnostic purposes. The company does offer a $19 paid version with more features. It also sells two editions for the business market-a $129 server edition and a $329 Enterprise edition.

Easeus Partition Master Home Edition is another free product that offers a user-friendly GUI to let you create, delete, resize, merge, and split partitions. You can also explore the files on your partitions and even defrag them if needed. Easeus supports all current flavors of Windows but can only handle 32-bit editions. A helpful recovery tool lets you revive files from deleted partitions. Easeus sells several paid editions, including a $39 professional edition (which supports 64-bit Windows) and a $159 server edition.

Paragon Partition Manager is one more free tool with the standard set of features. You can create, delete, move, copy, resize, and format your partitions. The software's user interface does a good job of leading you through each feature by graphically displaying your partitions and showing you only the specific commands available to run. You can also defrag your partitions, run surface scans, and check your file system. Several wizards help you with common tasks, such as creating, formating, copying, and deleting a partition. In addition to the free version, Paragon sells a personal edition for $40 and a pro edition for $80, both of which offer a range of advanced features.

Though these products are generally safe and secure, you'll want to take precautions before you use them since they do manipulate your partitioning information. Always be sure to back up your hard drive before you make any changes to your partitions. Also, make sure to create a boot CD-many of these tools help you create one-in case you run into trouble and can't boot off your hard drive. Finally, if you're working with a notebook, be sure it's plugged in and not running off battery power. If your PC shuts down in the middle of a partitioning maneuver, the partition can easily become hosed.

I used PartitionMagic for years and can recall only one time when the program rendered my boot partition unbootable. I had a boot CD that let me access my partitions, but no current backup (I know, I was bad). So it took a few hours of work to straighten out the boot and partition information and bring my PC back to life.

Among the products I mentioned, I find Partition Wizard the most capable and user friendly though I like some of the features in the Paragon software as well. But any of these should fit the bill if you need to juggle multiple operating systems and partitions on your PCs.