Partition Magic from Symantec helps organize data in an efficient manner. Right from dividing a hard disk into smaller areas called partitions, to creating, resizing, deleting, merging or splitting existing partitions on the hard drive. For example, one can have an 80 GB hard rive partitioned into 4 drives of 20 GB each. Each partition has some amount of data. If the user needs to load another operating system, for example Linux, he/she would definitely need a new partition. An operating system cannot be loaded onto a partition already holding some data; it will be wiped out. Partition magic can re-arrange the free space across the four partitions, re-arrange the data on all of these partitions and allocate the free space collectively into another partition on the drive, a fifth one.
Simply put, for any other similar purpose where the drive needs to be “re-structured”, without damaging any existing data, Partition Magic provides simple wizard-based steps. It allows to conversion of any partition from one file system to another with support for FAT, FAT16, FAT32, NTFS and Ext3 (Linux). It also supports USB2 and FireWire interfaces for manipulating external drives.
Partition Magic 8.0, the latest version from Symantec, bundles along Drive Image and BootIt. Drive Image allows you to backup your important data manually as well as automatically on scheduled times. BootIt is a small utility which helps you to choose between booting into different operating systems for those using more than one operating system on their PC. |
