Boot Manager - a cause for concern?

I'm a new customer to Paragon and purchased Hard Disk Manager to give myself flexibility in backing up Linux partitions and also as a modern partition manager. I already use Storagecraft's ShadowProtect for Windows backup and also Terabyte's Bootit NG for the odd partitioning job and to act as a boot manager for my two XP, one Win7 and one Linux partitions.

Shadowprotect Desktop doesn't support Linux partitions and Bootit is feeling dated. I'm also not familiar enough with Linux to feel really comfortable with Gparted.

My first experience with Paragon has not been encouraging, Boot Manager installed itself without me requesting it (from a WinPE CD boot), took control of my MBR and didn't restore it cleanly when I disabled Boot Manager.
Boot Manager seems to be included in the product just to tick a box - its functionality is way behind even Bootit (no default, no auto-hiding of non primary partitions, no interface editing) and very disappointing.
In contrast, ShadowProtect has always been absolutely rock-solid on Windows backup/restore and its WinPE environment has never done anything in the least unexpected.

I'm now nervous about the rest of the Paragon suite, should I be worried in letting Paragon loose on partition resizing?

 

The boot manager is for basic functionality, as you noted.

Personally, I let windows boot manager do the work instead.

However , the partitioning and imaging functions of the Paragon apps. are excellent.

 

Hi Ron……..I have to agree that the bootmanager is long past its sell by date and needs retiring ASAP. It’s not only useless but dangerous - come on Paragon, what are you playing at?

I’ve been using Paragon products for a dozen years and despite the current extremely buggy and complete dogs dinner of a GUI the partitioning functions are still rock solid. I would however advise against resizing partitions in any way that moves the start position on a drive. I mean this with any partition tool, not just Paragon. In fact if you must attempt it then Paragon would probably be the best choice. Moving the start of a partition will always be a risky operation and could also be an extremely lengthy one. You will always be quicker and safer cloning the partition to another location and then cloning it back to the new position either with resize, or resizing afterwards. This will also give you a full backup of your partition in case something goes wrong.

Luck
Bill

 

Hi Bill
Good post. I remain surprised that bootmanager is kept in the product. I haven't checked the 2011 version but I assume nothing has changed.
The overall GUI in hard disk manager suite does indeed seem very unfocussed, I skip straight past the initial crap to the full interface.
I've used the partitioning a few times now, seems solid and I was impressed that the WinPE version of the recovery disk recognised Intel RAID drives and worked well with them.

Paragon really need to look at their hideous bootmanager functionality and either ditch it from the suite or update it to be usable - it really does let the whole show down...
Regards - Ron

 

I had a bad experience with the boot manager as well. When I removed it, it messed up my MBR.

I agree that resizing the partition could be troublesome especially when reducing the size of the partition. Twice I tried reducing the size of my system partition by a few gigs (less than the free space), both resulting to unbootable systems. Good thing is the backup work perfectly