Partition Magic

Hi all,
Earlier, I always had Partition Magic on my computers. Sometime ago, I decided to go Disk Director. Does Disk Director work for you?

Question! What can Disk Director do that Partition Magic can't?

 

Robert,
See Magic vs Confidence below on May24.

A week ago I could not get DD\OSS to do anything but destroy any and all data on my hard drives, but with the help of this forum I learded how to do a few things with "Confidence" (can dual boot an old desktop).

Biggest difference I know of is DD can get support from this forum.

I read bad things on google about Magic since Symantec bought them out and I do not think they support Vista yet.

MangoMan

 

To me, Disk Director's biggest advantage over Partition Magic is that DD can not only view files in FAT, NTFS, Ext2, Ext3, or ReiserFS partitions, but it can also directly EDIT them. This capability is incredibly handy when setting up a multiboot environment and you need to edit boot.ini in Windows or fstab in Linux. You can do all of this from DD before first booting into your new setup. The sector editor is also very handy for modifying partition tables and other low-level tasks.

 

FWIW, PM can create folders.

Mike

 

I have used Partition Magic for many years, starting with the OS/2 versions. Today I was using it (ver. 8, the last version from PowerQuest) to perform a simple shrinking of a partition and after running for over 20 minutes, apparently was hung. Windows said it wasn't responding. I was able to close it but the drive was then inaccessible.

I installed the trial version of DD and in just a few minutes had recovered the entire 486GB partition. The trial version wouldn't let me assign a drive letter, but that was no problem. I immediately purchased the full version of DD and it was able to assign the old drive letter shrink the partition in just a few minutes. PM is now gone. Apparently it couldn't cope with my 500GB SATA drives.

I only wish there had been a discount for Acronis customers as I already own True Image Home 10.

 

I was a big fan of PM. It was the must have. But it does not support raid/disk controllers. DDS 10 does. After you install DDS make your Rescue disk, if you also have True Image 10 install it will also give you the option to add it to your Rescue Disk. It will copy all your raid/disk controllers drivers to the Rescue Disk (TI does this too), I have two different controllers on my PC. PM and Ghost do not do this; and they only do floppies. (Were DDS/TI does CD/DVD.) They will only work in windows. PM is version 8, I think that its like 5 yrs old.

DDS still needs to do a better with OSS. Does not properly support Vista.

See: https://www.wilderssecurity.com/showthread.php?t=148352

and

https://www.wilderssecurity.com/showthread.php?t=125363&highlight=unhide

 

PM will support raid/disk controllers if you use it with BartPE as a plugin.

I have both DD10 and PM8. I like DD10 much better overall, because it's much more robust as mentioned before. I've had PM8 mess up my partition table many times already, but haven't had that happen under DD10 at all.

Still, recently I had an experience where I was trying to run BartPE from an HD FAT16 partition. It won't run in a partition created by DD10 but will run in one created by PM8. I only discovered that after hours of head scratching almost running out of ideas at the time. I think there are subtle differences betwee the way each app creates a partition and most of the time these differences do not matter but sometimes they do matter.

 

I've found that if you want to use PM8, it's crucial to have a partition recovery tool close by, like Testdisk.

A lot of times it loads up the partition table and then tell you something's wrong with the table but it can fix it blah blah blah. Then you click ok, and then everything's messed up from then on.

 

I have been using PM since its version 3 in 1996. Problems so far I found with the version 8 as follows:
1) PM says there is an error and found solution and ask if you let PM fix it. If I let it do, then sometimes next thing PM says is that the entire physical drive is "BAD". What PM can do when this happens is deleting all partitions.
2) If a HDD with data stored in it is put in a box with USB interface and is connected to a PC, then PM8 very often says the whole HDD is "BAD"
4) PM8 says HDD is "BAD" when I attempt to modify HDD of name brand laptop PCs with OS preinstalled. It happend with Toshiba and Fujitsu brands.
Good things about PM8: It comes with sef-standing utilities as "PQBoot" and "PQBoot for Windows" to which no equivalent comes with DD.
Lastly, PM8 users be aware that DD does not seems to affect PM8 but PM8 does DD: If PM8 is installed in a target drive, then if you use "Set Active" of DD's functionality to switch OS to the one on the target drive, then BSOD will results. Only solution is uninstalling PM8.