Symantic PartitionMagic v8.0 (1 User)
Partition "BLACK" Magic 8.0
Be cautious using this product. I bought it becuase I needed to make my C: drive partition larger, thanks to Sony who only partitioned 15 Gig of my 40 Gig hard drive for my C: drive. Sony also created a hidden partition that wasted 5 Gig of my hardrive for recovery data instead of providing CD's. I bought the Recovery CD's from Sony so I didn't need that partition anymore. Hence, I went out and spent $69.00 on Norton Partition Magic 8.0, thinking that this would be the easiest way to give the wasted space on my hard drive back to my C: drive partition. The program installed easily and the interface was easy to understand. I had no problem deallocating the 5 Gig recovery partition. Then I tried to extend my C: drive partition using the unallocated space. I received an error message saying there was a problem with one of the sectors and Partition Magic would make no changes to my drive and close. OK, I was disappointed but no damage done, Right? Wrong! When I went to reboot I received an error message from my BIOS saying that no operating system could be found. I used the bootable Partition Magic CD to check out the problem and, to my shock and horror, found that the 15 Gig partition that had been my C: drive was now unformatted. I had basically lost everything. I didn't have the recovery disks that Partition Magic creates because Partition Magic only makes recovery disks using 3.5\\" floppies. Unfortunately, many notebooks, including mine, don't have floppy drives anymore and, you guessed it, I went screaming ahead without the disks that I couldn't create anyway. SO... I can't tell you if the recovery disks could have recoved my hard drive. There is no option for making a recovery CD. OK, to make my very long story short, Partition Magic was a real trooper at creating the partitions I needed as I rebuilt my hard drive from scratch.  Here I sit 24 hours later with my computer finally working again....but wait, didn't I spend the $69.00 to prevent the hassle and wasted time of rebuilding my drive in the first place? Why, yes I did. So, why did I give this product 2 stars? Because I'm a generous person. And it works great partitioning and formatting an unformatted hard drive, I can vouch for that. But then again so do the free Windows utilities.