Paragon Partition Manager 6 Personal

Now that hard disks are available in such large capacities, splitting them up into smaller, more manageable partitions makes a lot of sense, especially if you fancy experimenting with multiple operating systems on a single PC.

Paragon Partition Manager 6 Personal has all you need to split up your disks, plus some very handy extras.

The package starts with the main screen showing your current drive setup, rather than a traditional wizard, and from here you can create new partitions or resize existing ones.

Wizards appear for more complicated options but all dialogue windows are clear with sensible defaults. Partition Manger 6 works with a number of formats including Fat32, NTFS, ReiserFS and Ext2 and 3 Linux.

The CD itself is bootable and, should your Master Boot Record accidentally become corrupted, there's a file manager that can be used to copy information off an otherwise inaccessible partition.

The program also lets you edit text files, which is crucial for repairing damaged configuration data. If you don't have anywhere on your system to copy files to, data can be written to CD or DVD if you have the appropriate hardware.

We looked at Partition Manager 6 Personal, but a Professional version is also available. This offers the bonus of working with dynamic disks in Windows 2000 and later, and the option to schedule tasks such as defragmentation.

Both versions also include an ISO writer for creating CDs from disc images, and a boot manager.

Contact:
Greymatter 01364 655 182
www.greymatter.com
www.partition-manager.com

System requirements:

• Windows 95, 98, ME, NT, 2000, XP
• Linux partitions can be edited using the bootable CD
• 486 processor or higher
• 16MB Ram
• 12MB hard disk space