Has PM 11 corrected these supposed problems in ver. 10

[rounder]

I just read a review of PM10 on Amazon.com. It reads:

"1.0 out of 5 stars A huge step down from PM-9, May 24, 2010
By physics lover (California) - See all my reviews
Amazon Verified Purchase(What's this?)
This review is from: Paragon Partition Manager 10 Personal Edition (CD-ROM)
It pains me to write this review, because I have used Partition Manager 9 (PM-9) before, and I even rated it in these pages. It is an outstanding product, which I highly recommended. I bought PM-10 because it advertised to be Windows-7 compatible for 64-bit. It is not. It has a horrible bug, which was also reported by another reviewer here. (I wish I had seen his review earlier.)

PM normally makes complicated changes to the hard disks in the batch mode after a reboot. But if you are running Windows-7 64-bit, the reboot never takes place. You see, PM-10 modifies the Master Boot Record (MBR) in order to gain control of the machine before it boots into Windows, but it cannot find the MBR at the boot time (or perhaps it cannot interpret it correctly) to make the changes in the background. So instead it asks for a floppy disk to be inserted to continue. Such a disk does not exist (my machine does not even have floppy disk.) Lucky that I had made a recovery DVD in advance, so I had to re-install the Windows-7 again. Interestingly, even the re-installation of Windows-7 alone could not cure the problem. You have to get into the rescue mode from the PM-10 CD just to be able to boot Windows-7, and then you have to re-install PM-10 (which had gotten wiped out by the Windows-7 re-installation), and finally get into the boot manager (of PM-10) and disable it. Once this was fixed, I uninstalled it needless to say.

Chances are good that this bug never happens on the 32-bit Windows, but I cannot vouch for that. I never tried PM-10 on my older machines. But for 64-bit Windows-7, avoid PM-10. Hopefully PM-11 will fix this embarrassment. PM has been a very reliable and dependable product over the years. The paragon SW just slipped this time with version-10. Let's hope that it is a one time slip."

Was this problem for Windows 7, 64-bit recognized and corrected in version 11? Does Hard Disk Manager 2010 Suite have the partition software of PM 10 or 11?

[SIW2]

Hi,

There was an issue with "boot time " mode IF there was a 100mb system partition.

It works fine now in PM2010 and PM11 and PM10.

[rounder]

Thanks.

Would that have been an issue if the computer was not using the PM boot manager, i.e. on a system with a single OS? Or does PM always modify the MBR when it repartitions a HD?

[SIW2]

PM will change the patition table , obviously. If you perform the operation entirely within windows, or from the boot cd , there is no need for it to install it's own mini boot manager .

It won't affect the mbr executable code, unless you send it into boot time mode.

All products that have boot time mode operate in a similar fashion, irrespective of brand.

[rounder]

Under what circumstances would one send it into boot time mode?

[Paragon_MattK]

Boot time mode is used when any operation cannot be done "live" while the OS is running, basically this happens whenever Paragon asks you to reboot the machine. From that screen click the link "What files prevent operation completion" to see the files/processes that are preventing the operation from being completed live.

If nothing shows up in that list then it is the system that is locking the drive, which generally is caused by a page file being located on the drive, as the pagefile.sys file cannot be modified.

Edit:

To be clear, there are no longer any issues with the MBR when going in to bluescreen or "boot time" mode with versions 10 and above for all Paragon products. The previous issue involved version 9 of our software and x64 bit windows 7.