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If you have not yet heard of PartitionMagic for OS/2 & DOS you should check out our home page.
PartitionMagic allows non-distructive resizing of partitions.
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Michael Robertson Email: miker@powerquest.com
Vice President of Sales Phone: (801) 226-8977
PowerQuest Corporation Fax: (801) 226-8941
"The File System Experts"
Makers of PartitionMagic -- http://www.powerquest.com/
Ned Reiter (nreiter@execpc.com) writes (25th July, 1995):
Partition Magic (PM) is one OS/2 product that works just as advertised. I have used it on my SCSI drives in my tower system and on my notebook (Midwest Micro Soundbook w/520MB HD). In the case of the Soundbook, PM wouldn't run, it gave an error about the partition table. When I called tech support, I was given the name of the hidden file to download which had the latest version (1.02 at the time). However, that version still gave an error and wouldn't let me access the partition table. FDISK saw the partitions, but showed an extra 10MB of unused space, which couldn't be, since the drive was formatted as one partition from Midwest Micro. I had OS/2 installed as dual boot. Eventually, the system failed and refused to boot. The BIOS setup auto configure for the HD didn't seem right, so I manually configured the drive with parameters that Midwest Micro tech support had given me last year. I installed OS/2 and partitioned the disk into two drives. When I installed PM, it saw the partitions correctly.
I have since changed partition sizes on my SCSI drive and set up a new, unformatted partition (in anticipation of Warp Connect) with no problems. It only took about an hour to resize a ~770MB partition and move it up to make room for the new partition.
I can recommend this program without reservation. The tech support is excellent, updates are available from their BBS as well as on the Web.
I originally purchased Partition Magic because of its much-vaunted abilities to transform FAT drive to HPFS, something I namely wanted to do to preserve the (very delicate) existing WARP installation, installed with Dual Boot on a new IBM ThinkPad so I could install the PMX server for TCP-IP 2.0.
While every other process the Partition Magic can perform is just point-and-click and pretty much idiot proof, the conversion of your boot partition is not. Fortunately, however, the printed manual contained a keystroke-for-keystroke set of instructions that actually were keystroke-for-keystroke how to accomplish this process. I started the conversion, went to lunch, and by the time I came back, a nearly-full 540MB hard drive (in a notebook, no less) with over 400MB of data on it was converted without even a hiccup.
For my second installation (The license is for two machines!), I installed it on a machine with DOS/WIN FAT, OS/2 Warp HPFS, and Linux EXT2 partitions, with at least one of each type on two different drives (this thing is partition city!)
I have successfully resized both the Primary, Logical (Including extended) paritions of both drives (FAT and HPFS only), as well as moving all types of partitions within the free space that the re-sizing generated, all without failure.
This is on a DEC Celebris XL5100 (P5-100Mhz; NCR 810 SCSI-2; Seagate ST31230N 1GB C: and a DEC RZ28 2GB D:)
While moving a partion can be a rather lengthy process (the program surface scans the disk for every move), it has proven to be every bit as robust as I had originally hoped, and I can say that I would recommend this product quite highly to anyone who has a plethora of partitions which they are trying to manage, or wants (or needs) to convert their OS/2 FAT system to HPFS.
I found the manual to be clear, well-illustrated, and well-written; the interface to be very informative and very intuitive; and performance, while a little slow (though as compared to what I can't say), was extremely robust.
I recently purchased this product and it indeed does everything it's touted to do. I converted a FAT Partition to HPFS with Partition Magic in an unbelievably short time. On top of doing all it's supposed to do, it's also quite easy to use.
For hard drive maintenance, which I consider to be a chore, this product actually makes it palatable.