Using Partition Magic To Manage Your Disks - Page1

Partition Magic by Powerquest, is a powerful application, designed to help you manage your hard disks.  It allow you to split large hard disks into several parts (or partitions), resize existing partitions, and remove unwanted partitions, all without having to use the traditional method of partition setting, ie. wiping the hard disk, and using fdisk.

In addition to this, partition magic will allow you to convert a partition or drive from one file system to another, for example fat32 to ntfs and vise-versa.

Partition Magic can be used to great effect on multiple operating systems, such as Windows 98, 2000, XP, Linux & MS-Dos.

This article is intended as a straightforward guide to using Partition Magic, and while it may not cover every permutation of the application's usage, it hopefully will give you some helpful guidelines as to it's operation.

For the purposes of this article, we will take a computer running Windows 98SE on a 10 Gigabyte hard disk, and split the drive into two partitions, namely C: & D: .

The reasoning behind splitting a large drive into several partitions is so that we can manage the free space more efficiently, and give us somewhere to store our files away from the main system drive.  Using this layout, we minimise the chances of losing personal data in the event of our Windows system becoming corrupt or non-bootable.  This disk layout will not however safeguard your data in the event of a hard disk failure.

Warning!

Like any other application designed to work at a hardware level, Partition Magic does not feature any "Undo" facility.  If you make a mistake using this software, or your machine crashes during a PM operation, the contents of your disks may become damaged or unusable.

I highly recommend that you take steps to ensure that your data is safely backed up prior to using this software.  While Partition Magic is a stable, and reliable product, power failures or system crashes can occur, leaving your data inaccessible.

Getting Started

Partition Magic can be run either through Windows or MS-Dos.  The program interface for both versions of the software is intuitive, and similarly presented.  For the purposes of this guide, we will be using Partition Magic Pro 6.0 launched via MS-Dos boot disk.

1. Preparing your boot disks.

When you install the Windows version of Partition Magic, you will be given the opportunity to create "rescue disks".  These disks are simply a version of Partition Magic which will start your computer using ms-dos, therefore bypassing windows.

Shown below, is the boot disk creation process. You will need 2 blank, 1.44mb floppy disks, which will be used to create the boot & program disks.

Once this process is completed, you should have two disks.  Remember to label them and keep them stored safely when not in use.

2. Setting your boot priority.

In order to boot successfully from your floppy disk drive, it is important to ensure that you have set your bios to do so.  If you are unsure of the steps required, please refer to page one of the article entitled "Making an image of your hard disk using Norton Ghost" available here.

Provided you have successfully set you boot priority so that your machine attempts to boot from your floppy disk drive before either your hard disk, or cd-rom drive then you should insert the first disk you created.

Your machine will start to boot from this disk, and after a short pause, it will ask for the second disk to be inserted in your floppy disk drive:

Once you have inserted this disk, you should see the Partition Magic screen, as the program begins to load: