Monday, August 09, 2010

The Partitioning Of An Area

Some times you have to divide things up to make them work better. At least in the computer world. Which is why disc users who work with legacy systems often partition their systems. What to do? And how to do it? Well I found the testimonial on this page very helpful. Well what does it say? Just this:

My four stars for "Paragon Partition Manager 10" are to reflect the quality of the product as I found it to be. I was tempted to give it only three stars due to the major limitation that I had with it, however went with four due to the overall effort that the developers put into it. It is four starts because "I like it", however I doubt that I will be using it in the future. Others will likely find also that it is a good program, but not needed as there are free alternatives ("Partition Wizard Home Edition", "GNU Parted") that completely fill their needed.

*** "Paragon Partition Manager 10": Works with Windows and (primary drive) Linux partitions. Sadly, does not work with Linux partitions on logical drives.

*** "Partition Wizard Home Edition": Free. Works with Windows partitions. Does not work with Linux partitions.

*** "GNU Parted": Free. Works with Linux partitions. Does not work with Windows partitions.

*** Having both "Partition Wizard Home Edition" and "GNU Parted" will likely do everything that you need.
Partition Wizard is free? I like that price. So I down loaded it from Partition Wizard Home Edition. And then I tried it out. I decided to allocate 10GB to a new partition. The software was simple. It asked me how many megs I wanted in my new partition. I entered a number and clicked. And I got back the usual warning: "Open programs - do you want to shut them down or change partitions during reboot?" I chose "reboot" as the preferred option. It seemed the safest. So I rebooted. I got one or two unexpected screens (transient) during the reboot and then everything was back. Whhheeeww (always backup before changing your fundamentals - you will be more relaxed during operations). So I checked. Sure enough 10 GB was now in an unallocated partition.

When I add Linux to the system I'll check out GNU Parted and give a report.

Let me add that this is part of my ongoing saga about a failing hard drive and this is actually where I planned to start if my hard drive had not started to go bad. As the saying goes: even if it does not profit me I have had a profitable experience. I learned something.

Cross Posted at Classical Values

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