Partition Magic

Post by **Beta Freak** » Sat Nov 25, 2006 8:54 am

I am thinking about Partitioning my Spare PC hard drive.
Does Partition Magic format your hard drive while doing it or does it leave it untouched. (Apart from the new partition.)
Thanks

Post by **empireum** » Sat Nov 25, 2006 8:56 am

It leaves other partitions untouched unless you resize them, for example. It's especially designed to allow changes to your HD's partition scheme without destrroying the data on the other partitions even when you resize or move them.

Post by **Andy** » Sat Nov 25, 2006 9:01 am

Be careful with it. Partition magic has destroyed a partition with lots of valuable stuff on it to me once. I managed to recover it but I never trust it with data again.

Post by **empireum** » Sat Nov 25, 2006 9:06 am

This has never happened to me. I was lucky then I guess. I have to say that I've used multiple versions of PM and 5.0x seemed to be more buggy then 4.0x or 8.0x. Anyway, I've had more problems with 5.0x than with the other versions. But I always make backups (and strongly advise to do so) before using PM or any other tool that messes around with the partition table.

Post by **___** » Sat Nov 25, 2006 3:37 pm

i have heard stories where data has been lost, so back up anything important

Post by **unblestone** » Mon Nov 27, 2006 10:25 am

Ive used PM8 without problems on many an occasion.
What people fail or forget to do before using it , is to
defrag their drive prior to using it.
Naturally you will lose data if it is spread accross your
entire drive prior to splitting it.

Post by **Andy** » Mon Nov 27, 2006 5:36 pm

unblestone wrote:Ive used PM8 without problems on many an occasion.
What people fail or forget to do before using it , is to
defrag their drive prior to using it.
Naturally you will lose data if it is spread accross your
entire drive prior to splitting it.

Not true. It moved all data in the partition process. I never used to defrag my drive and it worked fine. One day it was partitioning and the pc crashed, thats what caused my loss.

Post by **JErick** » Sun Dec 10, 2006 10:52 am

How odd. I use it exclusively, and it caused me no problems. All my partitions have been created/resized using PM and no issues here And defragmenting should help. I haven't tried anything older than 8 though.

Post by **empireum** » Sun Dec 10, 2006 10:43 pm

Agreed. PM usually does the defragmenting for you before doing anything to your partitions. When using other (free) tools, this might be different, though.