I am more a malware hunt and defend type so today went for a swim in different territory of unchartered waters. In haste to replace a smaller capacity WD hard drive with a more generous 1 Terabyte I run into a small issue. The computer tech gave a good discount on this like-new model since they were fresh out of 1T packaged new. They had some handy like this due to people changing out for SSD of course. And it was a Toshiba which is cool because all my drives purchased new so far are the same brand. I get good mileage with this manufacture so far. Western Digital not so much unfortunately. Seagate either. When I tried to do a fast and dirty restore to it using Reflect it was giving a choice to delete an already existing partition, I proceeded and when it booted up there was on the order of 800Gb unallocated space! What a freaking dimwit. Instead of taking the time to wipe then install the choice to work with Reflect just to delete the partition left a lot of real estate to reclaim. I tried Paragon, been using it for years since XP but for some reason this time it didn't extend the primary and returned an error. oh oh With absolute zero experience with command prompt I tried to go through that with Diskpart but the List Volume OF COURSE only shows partitions not the DISK. As a last resort before I just resign to wiping the disk clean (probably should have in the first place right?) and starting from scratch the only other Partition Manager I have onboard is Partition Guru. Man oh man, with little to no recent use and a long time even using a partition manager of any sort for awhile this thing came through with flying colors and not only easily tacked on all that unallocated space but did the operation almost in an INSTANT! too. On boot up it dropped down low level and on the display showed the progress bar and moved along within, let's see, 30 seconds or so? After that Presto! right back in business again. For now on this PG is my go-to choice for managing partition and disk detail. Just wanted to share this experience AND give a nod to this particular program for those who might need a quick and efficient help on something like this next time And while we are at it here, in closing, do you guys recommend another and/or other partition managers that you also consider good and reliable disk program(s)? Dangerous territory with these if caution is not exercised or the steps not properly taken.
Thanks zapjb, I will get right on it looking at both those for a reserve or even first measure Partition Manager. Any particular reason you prefer those two? Used to perform all sorts of different arrangements on XP 32 bit drives but today proved that over time it's easy to lose your way a little.
They have simple almost idiot proof Gui's so I'm sure I'm doing the correct operation. And they've always worked for me. Edit: Ime AOMEI is the easiest of the 2.
Exactly what's needed because I dunno about you but I very rarely bother making or moving partitions around anymore due to wallet size external drives these days with plenty of capacity to divide up if desired. PartGuru bailed my bacon and it too was a very simple GUI easy to understand. The best part of all is that it did the job and made short work of it too.
