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Partition Magic 6.0 does
what it claims to do and well

by Lloyd Boutwell, ORCOPUG MEMBER
Printed in Nibbles & Bits, February 2001

As always PowerQuest has done it again with Partition Magic 6.0. It is certainly a pleasure to review a software program that does what it claims to do and does it well. I now own Version 2 through 6 of Partition Magic. I wanted Version 6 since I “upgraded” to Windows Me, which is not compatible with earlier versions of PM because of the DOS thing (some PM features require a DOS-like operation).

I believe that most everyone is familiar with Partition Magic by now so I won’t go into the obvious features but there are new capabilities that need to be recognized.

PM6 was a no-brainer to install; in fact, it deletes earlier versions of PM so you don’t have to bother. I had the opportunity to try PM6 on three different computers. The first is an old 486 running Windows 98SE. The second is a slightly later computer, a Pentium II (266 MHz). The third and latest, at least for me, computer is a Pentium III (600 MHz). The second and third computers are running Windows Me.

Everything went without a hitch on the first computer and I even had the chance to use the undelete partition feature. However, there was a slight glitch with the Pentium II. I found that I had to disconnect my SCSI ZIP and JAZ drives otherwise the computer would lockup when I tried to run PM6. With the SCSI drives disconnected everything went smoothly. It appears that PM6 does not like the hardware combination of Iomega’s BUZ interface card and the removable drives.

This problem also existed with the earlier versions of Partition Magic, so I was not surprised. The Pentium III computer also has a SCSI JAZ drive but the interface card is Adaptec’s 2930 and PM6 had no problems with this combination. I also had an EIDE hard drive connected to my USB using an adapter and PM6 found this drive as well, although it took many minutes before I saw the results.

I almost thought the software quit—it took so long. I was pleasantly surprised that not only did PM6 work with Windows Me but also there are some additional features such as Tree View, Scale Disk Map, and Copy Partition. Tree View is very similar to the view available with the Windows file Explorer and is very convenient if you have more than one hard drive on your system. I have three hard drives on the Pentium III computer and the Tree View quickly showed me the status of all three drives without having to scroll through a list like the earlier PM versions required.

The Scale Disk Map is somewhat of a goody since it just gives you a relative display of each hard drive’s capacity. One of the biggest surprises was the Copy Partition feature. This allowed me to transfer my software system from one hard drive to another.

Although it is not as straight forward as PowerQuest’s Drive Copy or Drive Image, I will not have to upgrade my version 2.0 of Drive Image (the current version available is 4.0).

Suggested retail price is $69.95, or $29.95 for the upgrade. BUT, User group members can get Partition Magic for $30 at PowerQuest’s user group site. Go to http://www.ugr.com/order. Give our user group name and the special code, UGFLYR00, to be eligible for the discount price. You can print the form and mail, or order online. Be sure to see The PowerQuest Bundle, too. It costs only $99 for Partition Magic, Drive Image, Second Chance, and Lost and Found! —LG