Partition Magic indispensable

WHEN YOU'VE BEEN SLAVING away in the IT industry for the best part of 30 years, it isn't often that you come across a piece of software that makes you think 'Well, that's bloody clever.' But one package has been doing just that since I first came across it while doing time at IBM five or six years ago.

It was a pretty early command line version back then, but it's now blossomed into a 'proper' Windows version, still with that gee-whiz factor. PartitionMagic is now on version 7.0 and it's a piece of software that does very clever things indeed with hard disks. Things that anyone who knows a bit about the strange and eldritch world of partitions, FAT tables and Master Boot Records is rightly a bit twitchy about.

The potential for losing everything on your hard disk is there, yet PartitionMagic instils such a feeling of confidence after using it for a few years, that I - very unwisely, I know - let it convert a FAT32 partition to NTFS then merge two NTFS partitions into a single one without backing up the data at all.

And it didn't let me down.

Briefly, I had a machine which dual booted Windows ME and Windows 2000. Win2K had been updated to XP and I no longer wanted ME and its FAT32 partition. So converting the 15Gig FAT32 to NTFS then merging the original NTFS partition to give one nice 30Gig partition was the obvious thing to do.

PartitionMagic is so easy to use that even folk with no knowledge of what they're doing would find it hard to cock things up. It can now deal with partitions of up to 80Gb, and can for the first time merge NTFS partitions without copying the data first, provided they're using the same NTFS version and cluster size. It also supports external USB drives and there's a professional version that includes scripting and remote operation.

For £49.99 including VAT (£39.99 for an upgrade), this is the only utility I wouldn't be without. It's so powerful that it's actually fun to watch it in action. µ