Partition Magic anyone???

Hi,

First of all, thanks for keeping all of the questions in your forum. They are quite useful. But as I read them it seems like most people are trying to steer around using Partition Magic to do dual/multiple boots. Is it the expense or is there another reason? Here is why I ask.

I have some both new and legacy software/hardware that requires me to install the following on my computer: windows 95, 2 copies of 98, XP and then some version of Linux - I am going to take the plunge - so I need some kind of boot manager that will be STABLE, relatively easy to use and flexible enough to accomodate any and everything I throw at it. From reading in generic review columns it seems that this is a good way to go. Is that true? BTW, I found a couple of places that will sell PM 8.0 for about $25

I appreciate all of your opinions...but value experienced advice :)

T

If you can get PM 8 for that price then I'd say go for it if you're gonna keep some version if windows on the pc.

Boot manager? PM has it's own but I'd think it's preferable to use Grub or LILO.

Hi...thanks for your quick response! But can you tell me why you prefer to use Grub or LILO?

Thanks :)

Because when you install most versions of linux it will write grub or lilo to the mbr for you. It may not be easy to setup PM's boot manager with all the right options unless you have an understanding of booting and all that. Unless I'd had a nose at my existing grub or lilo set up I wouldn't try and set it up using PM. I don't think I know enough about it.

And grub or lilo will happily put the windows boot option for you.

There have been problems with Partition Magic not correctly calculationg the correct parameters. I have temporarily switched to the Acronis Disk Director Suite and Partition Magic 8.02 seems to be more accurate. I suspect that the issues were related to disk size with the old Powerquest version not working correctly on drives over 80 Gb. The new Norton version is the 8.02 version and is supposed to work with disks up to 160 Gb.

Counterspy

Try to use the open source tools as much as possible, especialy grub.

PQM is not the reliable workhorse it used to be (I've owned it for years). You got to wonder how much testing went into version 8.0 such that a serious bug like the one that would make XP unbootable when using BootMagic from within Windows wasn't caught before the product was released. Also, it *still* doesn't support ReiserFS.

The main reason for using PQM now is to resize NTFS partitions that aren't fully defragmented with the data consolidated at the front of the partition. I don't know if XP's defragmenter does this - Win2k's didn't. If the data is consolidated, NTFSResize will resize the empty area.

PM screwed up my hard drive twice. Stupid ^&@&(&@.

can i ask why you need to have win95 and 2 copies of win98 installed along with xp? just kind of curious :)

big_k105 i had the same question too..i think there is no reason to have all these !@##! os in a pc :shock:

Quote:

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Originally Posted by andmalc

The main reason for using PQM now is to resize NTFS partitions that aren't fully defragmented with the data consolidated at the front of the partition. I don't know if XP's defragmenter does this - Win2k's didn't. If the data is consolidated, NTFSResize will resize the empty area.

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NTFSResize 1.9 an up can safely resize fragmented partitions too, no need to defragment NTFS anymore: http://mlf.linux.rulez.org/mlf/ezaz/...tml#fragmented