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"Does the job, but for the love of Lord and Lady, do a backup!"
Pros
Partitioning management both within Windows and outside, bundled boot manager
Cons
Gives you the power to kill everything you love with one click, assumes you still use floppies
Summary
I'll review the software in and of itself in a moment. But, first, here's a word of caution.
As you might have guessed, I've killed off my hard drive. I didn't lose its data, just its boot-ability. Specifically, I started with a dual boot configuration, XP (... Read full review
I'll review the software in and of itself in a moment. But, first, here's a word of caution.
As you might have guessed, I've killed off my hard drive. I didn't lose its data, just its boot-ability. Specifically, I started with a dual boot configuration, XP (on NTFS) and Linux, with a pre-existing boot manager. BootMagic required a FAT32 partition, so I created one, but in order to do so, I deleted my Linux partitions, with the idea of rebuilding fresh ones. Unfortunately, the boot manager went with it, and the NTFS partition was moved, so it's no longer bootable. (Thankfully, I have a second hard drive with a fresh install of XP already on it, with the idea of using the old partition as a backup in case Vista couldn't run one or more important programs. I can boot there, and that copy of XP sees the other NTFS partition. So, even if I weren't paranoid about backup, I'd still just be out reinstalling everything--twice, since I'm also doing a fresh Vista install, once I get my two drives sorted out.)
PartitionMagic did its job just fine, but, it does not deliver quite on its promise to make drive partitioning as user-friendly--it gave no advice or warnings about pre-existing boot managers, or at least didn't put such warnings in a place where I'd see it. It did give the obvious "back up everything."
The program handles reading, writing, and resizing + or - all the standard partition formats--the FATs, NTFS, and Ext3, as well as Linux swap partitions. I have yet to see how it handles Vista Ultimate's bitlocker encryption, though given its lack of willingness to share partition management with others, my predictions are pessimistic.
Note that when first installing it, it gives you the opportunity to create rescue disks in the event that you lose the ability to boot up. But, it only does this with floppy disks, not with USB flash drives or other present day technology. The software itself is a bit dated and due for an update, and I would remind Symantec that the majority of new computers do not have floppy drives any more.
A quick update to those following my saga. After booting into my newly created second XP partition, I had to wait for two hours, while XP found itself and put back all the files in their regular places against a blue "x% progress" screen. (Not a Blue Screen of Death, but rather the light and dark blue screen of life.) Funny thing is, afterwards, my new XP partition didn't boot any more--not that I needed it to.
Right now, I've unplugged the hard drive with the mysteriously repaired old XP partition, and for that matter the BootMagic partition, so my computer only sees the drive with the new XP partition. Because upgrade versions of Vista do not even bother asking for an old CD, but instead looks for an installed and running XP, I had to re-reinstall XP over the course of a half-hour, only as a sacrificial lamb to the alter of Windows Vista Ultimate Edition, 64 bit edition. I'm in Vista now (see my review of Vista). Once everything is running, after I've migrated day to day activity to the Vista partition, I'm considering then reinstalling XP on the other drive, but using the BIOS rather than Boot Magic to select drives. (I can then put a version of Linux on another partition of the XP drive, and pick boot OSes manually.) PartitionMagic is still useful to me as a way of resizing and formatting partitions, but BootMagic might not be any easier or more reliable than manually picking boot options.
Latest update. I've got Vista up and running, and I tried installing PartitionMagic in Vista, but it won't run--it's not compatable. Looks like this program desperately is in need of a version 9.0!
I'll have to boot back into XP just to finish doing my partition formatting.
