System Requirements:
Windows 95b thru Windows 98 SE, Windows ME, Windows NT 4.0 Workstation with SP6a - 32MB RAM 150 Pentium compatible Windows 2000 Professional - 64MB RAM Pentium150 compatible Windows XP ? 128MB RAM Pentium 233 compatible 70MB hard disc space, CD drive (any speed), 3.5" floppy drive, VGA or higher with 800x600 pixels.

First let me explain some of the advantages of partitioning your hard drive. When you get your computer from the manufacturer, it normally has only one very large partition, in which your operating system, programs and data files are stored. The storing of everything in one large space is a very inefficient way to do things; at a minimum you should keep your data separate from the operating system and programs.  Partitioning software enables you to breakdown your hard drive into separate manageable partitions to efficiently utilize the space and make management and back up of operating systems, programs and data much easier.

PartitionMagic allows you to quickly and easily create, resize, move, label and copy existing partitions. You can also convert existing partition formatting. All without destroying your existing data. Included with PartitionMagic 8.0 is BootMagic, a disk management tool that helps run multiple operating systems on the same computer. Also included with the version being reviewed is PowerQuest DataKeeper, which according to PowerQuest "provides an easy way for you to perform secure, automated backups of all your important data." The review that follows will only deal with PartitionMagic itself, as I have alternate backup software and do not have an additional operating system to use at this time.

PartitionMagic 8.0 was installed on a Windows XP, 2.13 GHz, AMD Athlon E Machines computer with 480MB of RAM, a 120GB hard drive and a 20GB secondary hard drive. The installation took a total of 20 minutes, which included viewing the tutorial and needed very little interaction beyond providing user information and the serial number. As with most new applications, the printed documentation is very scant, however there is a full user guide in PDF format on the installation CD and installed to the hard drive and accessible by clicking Help> User Guide. I had made a complete system back up using a disk imaging software and verified the back up's integrity before installing PartitionMagic and as should always be done before a major system change in my opinion.

Once the installation was completed, I created a 10GB "data" partition and a 10GB "music" partition, G: & H: respectively, on the 120GB main hard drive to enable backups of this information to be easier and smaller than if everything was lumped together. This process was completed in a 10 minute period of time, which included rebooting to DOS, applying the changes, rebooting once again to Windows XP and creating a new rescue disk. I then moved 915MB of data files to the G:\Data partition and 781MB of music files to the H:\Music partition, with the moves taking approximately 35 minutes and once verified deleted from the original C:\ locations.

There will be cause for more partitions to be created and eventually resized or merged along the line and I will do so with confidence as I have done so many time with the previous version of PartitionMagic. The only reason for my moving to this latest version is that the pervious version would not handle partitioning a hard drive over 80GB. I did not notice any large differences in the way this new version works, compared to the previous version.  I did note however that the drive letters for the CD and DVD drives did not change, but rather the new partitions were created using the next available driver letters; this I think is due to Windows XP rather than PartitionMagic. USB, USB2 and FireWire hard drives under Windows are supported, except that operations executed in boot mode are not supported, at least according to the documentation, however I was unable to verify this as I do not have any such hard drives available at this time. This is far and away the easiest to install and utilize software that I have run across. That said, this is not for everyone, a good amount of computer knowledge is necessary to get the full benefits of such a program.