Norton PartitionMagic 8.0 - Create- Resize- Copy Partitions Description:

Norton PartitionMagic 8.0 - Create, Resize, Copy Partitions review:
2 stars (Partition "BLACK" Magic 8.0) - Be cautious using this product. I bought it becuase I needed to make my C: drive partition larger, thanks to Sony who only partitioned 15 Gig of my 40 Gig hard drive for my C: drive. Sony also created a hidden partition that wasted 5 Gig of my hardrive for recovery data instead of providing CD's. I bought the Recovery CD's from Sony so I didn't need that partition anymore. Hence, I went out and spent $69.00 on Norton Partition Magic 8.0, thinking that this would be the easiest way to give the wasted space on my hard drive back to my C: drive partition. The program installed easily and the interface was easy to understand. I had no problem deallocating the 5 Gig recovery partition. Then I tried to extend my C: drive partition using the unallocated space. I received an error message saying there was a problem with one of the sectors and Partition Magic would make no changes to my drive and close. OK, I was disappointed but no damage done, Right? Wrong! When I went to reboot I received an error message from my BIOS saying that no operating system could be found. I used the bootable Partition Magic CD to check out the problem and, to my shock and horror, found that the 15 Gig partition that had been my C: drive was now unformatted. I had basically lost everything. I didn't have the recovery disks that Partition Magic creates because Partition Magic only makes recovery disks using 3.5" floppies. Unfortunately, many notebooks, including mine, don't have floppy drives anymore and, you guessed it, I went screaming ahead without the disks that I couldn't create anyway. SO... I can't tell you if the recovery disks could have recoved my hard drive. There is no option for making a recovery CD. OK, to make my very long story short, Partition Magic was a real trooper at creating the partitions I needed as I rebuilt my hard drive from scratch. Here I sit 24 hours later with my computer finally working again....but wait, didn't I spend the $69.00 to prevent the hassle and wasted time of rebuilding my drive in the first place? Why, yes I did. So, why did I give this product 2 stars? Because I'm a generous person. And it works great partitioning and formatting an unformatted hard drive, I can vouch for that. But then again so do the free Windows utilities.
5 stars (Resizing magic!) - i bought Partition Magic on the advice of a friend, since I wanted to increase the size of the partition from which I booted the computer. With Partition Magic I was able to accomplish this task speedily and seamlessly! IT worked like a breeze! I would recommend this software highly to anyone who is not a computer technical whizz like myself, but who may wish to do something "technical" with their computer.



STeve Smith
5 stars (Norton PartitionMagic 8.0) - This product is excellent. I used it to resize partitions and add new partitions without losing any data. I added new partitions, or resized existing ones on several machines without even reading the manual. Very easy to use. This is a first rate product. I tested it on dual boot Windows 2000/XP, and Red Hat Linux 9 with no problems. I never lost any data and I now have very nicely partitioned my machines. I like to have 2 separate partions for each operating system, and this product did the job flawlessly.