Merging Partitions
http://live.pirillo.com/ – People create logical disk partitions for various reasons: sometimes it’s to separate data, while other partitions can contain different operating systems, and still others can be used to store the swap space. But, how do you remerge partitions into one physical drive, instead of having multiple logical partitions? There are few tools you can use.
Partition Magic is the worlds most famous partition manager, which has all of the GUI goodness that Windows users have come to expect.
Ranish is a free partition manager that will let you boot into a safe environment where you can manage the hard disk partitions.
Windows Vista does come with a halfway decent partition management utility, which should let you delete and reallocate partition space.
Of course, if you’re feeling adventurous, you could always use fdisk.
What do you use to manage your partitions?
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9 Comments
Peter - SoftwareCasa
June 26th, 2007
at 10:08pm
Thanks Chris,
I feel one software well worth mentioning as well is Paragon Partition Manager.
Peter - SoftwareCasa
June 26th, 2007
at 10:08pm
Thanks Chris,
I feel one software well worth mentioning as well is Paragon Partition Manager.
Tiago Correia
June 27th, 2007
at 2:09am
I use Gparted a opensource program for partition managment
http://gparted.sourceforge.net/
Very good to use.
Bill Hudgins
June 27th, 2007
at 6:25am
I use GParted, a Linux utility that boots from a CD to extend partitions. We have to reimage drives many times a year in our public library environment, but we don’t reimage the entire drive: only the areas containing the OS and user data, which may make up only 20% of the drive. (We use PC-AID for image cloning). So we’re left with a lot of space which can be extended. The whole task from re-imaging to finished drive takes about 20 minutes for a typical public access drive.
Bill Hudgins
June 27th, 2007
at 6:25am
I use GParted, a Linux utility that boots from a CD to extend partitions. We have to reimage drives many times a year in our public library environment, but we don’t reimage the entire drive: only the areas containing the OS and user data, which may make up only 20% of the drive. (We use PC-AID for image cloning). So we’re left with a lot of space which can be extended. The whole task from re-imaging to finished drive takes about 20 minutes for a typical public access drive.
Gary Greene
June 27th, 2007
at 7:43am
Actually, I normally fire up either Knoppix or SystemRescue CD and use QtParted, an open source Partition Magic clone with many of the same features as the commercial tool, but with less cost. It can resize NTFS, FAT32, and Linux file systems. Not sure if it handles HFS and HFS+ Macintosh partitions…..
Rick
June 27th, 2007
at 9:24am
Another priceless partition manipulation tool formerly marketed by the quite excellent company PowerQuest, originator of Partition Magic, was Server Magic. Server Magic was specifically targetted to do the job that Partition Magic performed on desktop OSes, but doing it specifically on server OSes. Unfortunately, PowerQuest never had the opportunity to update that very powerful application to work with Windows 2003 Server.
Before the demise of PowerQuest due to its purchase by Symantec, Partition Magic was regularly updated to support new OSes and technologies as they came into being. Their titles were also very resonably priced, given their capabilities.
Now that Symantec owns the remnants of PowerQuest, Partition Magic has been allow to moulder, and the outlook is for Partition Magic to die a horrible death, just like Delrina WinFax Pro, @tGuard and a multitude of other fine products wiped-out by Symantec’s acquire-and-crush tactics.
The loss of PowerQuest was a terrible blow to IT professionals’ software toolboxes and the marketing of reasonably-priced quality software..
Michael Harrington
June 27th, 2007
at 2:41pm
I recommend and use Acronis Disk Director (http://www.acronis.com/). You can run it from Windows or from a special bootable CD you can create from within their program.
Armando Barreiro
June 28th, 2007
at 6:44am
You’ll be surprised to find how much you can do with the very small distro and bootable CD of Puppy Linux. I find no need to use Knoppix anymore.
Armando