All physical drives are associated with letters. By adding or deleting partitions, the PC's drive assignments tend to get jumbled up Not only that, but you might end up invalidating shortcuts and Registry entries that point to specific files and directories (for instance, you might store your digital photos on drive M). To keep everything in order, PartitionMagic provides DriveMapper, a utility that searches for software references gone awry and adjusts the shortcuts to reflect your new partitions. PartitionMagic also creates rescue floppy disks during installation (or anytime, using the option under the Tools menu) that allow you to run PartitionMagic and BootMagic as DOS utilities. For example, if you hide a partition by accident, the rescue floppy disks allow you to boot up your machine and manipulate the drive's overall configuration.
Speaking of booting up, PartitionMagic 8 includes BootMagic, a simple utility that manages your PC's boot process. If you install more than one operating system on your PC, BootMagic lets you select which operating system you want at start-up.
Perhaps PartitionMagic's best feature remains Secure Erase, which wipes a drive by overwriting it with random passes of ones and zeros. Secure Erase can take a while, depending on the size of the partition (10 minutes on average), but it's useful if you're preparing an old PC for recycling or for sale.
Performance
We successfully divided our 240GB hard drive without incident.
Support
There is precious little additional information aside from the built-in help. Gone is the 150-page printed manual that PowerQuest provided; Symantec has made it a PDF file instead, which isn't useful if your hard drive's messed up. And the online FAQ knowledge base, which works in both Internet Explorer and Firefox, contains only five answers. If you still can't find an answer, Symantec offers live technical-support options. In our tests, free online chat required about 15 minutes of wait time, free e-mail averaged about 72 hours for a response, and a live conversation over the phone required a $9.95 charge and a 30-minute wait. But to use any of these options, we were required to first fill in our name, address, e-mail, and telephone number.
Conclusion
Whether you're upgrading to a new operating system or just want to do a little housekeeping on an existing hard drive, you need PartitionMagic's power and flexibility.
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Where to buy
Norton PartitionMagic 8.0:
$62.42 - $89.99
| store | price | in stock? | rating |
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$62.42 | Yes |
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$62.49 | Yes |
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$89.99 | Yes |
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$69.99 | Yes |
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