Partition Magic 2.01
for OS/2, Windows 95, Windows & DOS

by Pete Cassetta, Alamo PC

Partition Magic is aptly named; it can reorganize a hard disk more easily and safely than I ever imagined possible. You can think of this product as a supercharged replacement for FDISK, FORMAT, and CHKDSK. It has won a long list of industry awards, including Best of COMDEX (Fall '95) in the Utility category.

Partition Magic comes in two versions: one for Windows 95 and DOS (SRP $49.95), and a more deluxe version that also supports OS/2 (SRP $69.95). I reviewed the OS/2 version. System requirements are 386 or higher processor, 8 MB RAM (4 MB if run under DOS), and DOS 5.0 or later or OS/2 2.1 or later. You also need 4.5 MB of hard disk space to install, but installation is optional, as you can actually run directly from the floppy disks.

Drives and Partitions

To help you appreciate all this product can do, I will briefly review the basics of hard disk partitions and logical drives.

Although most people simply use their hard disk as a single monolithic drive C:, quite a bit more flexibility is possible. You can subdivide a hard disk into four partitions. Three of these may be "primary" partitions, and one may be an "extended" partition. The extended partition may be further subdivided into multiple "logical" drives, each of which will have a separate drive letter. In general, only one primary partition can be "active" (that is, visible to an operating system) at a time. Consider the following example scenario (which is similar to how I've arranged my hard disk):

Primary Partition 40 MB C: (Boot DOS & Windows 3.1)
Primary Partition 100 MB C: (Boot Windows 95)
Primary Partition 100 MB C: (Boot OS/2 Warp)
Extended Partition
- Logical Drive 200 MB D: (Programs)
- Logical Drive 70 MB E: (Data)

This setup has three advantages over a single monolithic drive C:

Multiple Operating Systems. With this arrangement, you can boot into DOS/Windows, Windows 95, or OS/2 Warp, depending on which of the three primary partitions is set as active.

Storage Optimization. When using the FAT file system (native to DOS and Windows 95, but also supported by OS/2 and Windows NT), disk space is allocated in "clusters." Even a 1-byte file always occupies an entire cluster. Larger drive sizes require larger cluster sizes, wasting more space. By dividing your hard disk into multiple partitions and logical drives, you can use smaller cluster sizes. In the above example, every partition has a cluster size of 2K, except drive D:, which has 4K clusters. If the entire hard disk were set up as a monolithic drive C:, it would be 510 MB in size, requiring a wasteful cluster size of 8K.

Organization. Operating systems, programs, and data are kept separate. This facilitates backup; just backup drive E: to safeguard all your data. To install a new operating system, just devote a partition to it and you won't have to worry about overwriting another installed operating system (remember that only one drive C: is visible to the computer at any one time).

Unique Features

You can actually create elaborate disk partitioning schemes using FDISK, particularly OS/2's FDISK. However, Partition Magic can do a number of remarkable things that FDISK cannot: check, resize, and move partitions, modify cluster sizes, expand the Windows 95 root directory to accommodate more long file names, and convert FAT partitions to HPFS (that's High Performance File System, an alternative to FAT which is supported under OS/2 and Windows NT).

Even better, Partition Magic can do all these operations with no loss of data! There's no need to backup and restore all your data when modifying partitions, as you must do with FDISK. Partition Magic can also format partitions as either FAT or HPFS; FDISK requires you to run the separate FORMAT program that comes with the operating system.

To see the benefits of Partition Magic, consider the example hard disk described above. Suppose that after a while you want to install a new program, but drive D: is too full. With Partition Magic, it's simple to shrink drive E: (or any other drive with free space) by 20 MB or whatever and then enlarge D: by the same amount. Without Partition Magic, this would require backing up D: and E:, running FDISK to resize them, running FORMAT to reformat them, and then restoring your data.

Operation

Partition Magic includes three versions with identical features: graphical OS/2, graphical DOS, and text-mode OS/2. While you can use any version to check your partition, you can't use the graphical OS/2 version to make changes on a partition that has any open files. In this case you must boot DOS and run the DOS version, or boot OS/2 in maintenance mode and run the text-mode OS/2 version. I found it easiest to just use the DOS version for making changes to partitions.

As mentioned earlier, you don't need to install Partition Magic at all. It runs fine from its floppy disks. This is great for occasional use. If you use it frequently, you may want to install to the hard disk, which creates an icon on the OS/2 desktop.

I found the program very well-designed, easy to operate, and solid. It performs well on minimal hardware; I tested on a 25 MHz 386 with 8 MB of memory and it was quite responsive. The manual is very well-written, and includes a good tutorial on hard disk partitioning. It also gives several example scenarios you might want to adopt for y

our hard disk, along with step-by-step instructions for creating them. Partition Magic is compatible with all partitions and logical drives created by DOS and Windows 95 (FAT), OS/2 (HPFS), Windows NT (NTFS), NetWare, and Linux. It is also compatible with Stacker for OS/2 and DOS.

Recommendations

This is a great product! I would recommend it to anybody who wants more control over their hard disk, and highly recommend it to users of multiple operating systems or those who frequently install and test new software.

Partition Magic is made by PowerQuest Corporation. You can reach them by phone (800-379-2566) or e-mail (magic@powerquest.com), or just visit their web page (http://www.powerquest.com).