Symantic PartitionMagic v8.0 (1 User)
Works Fine, But Be Very, Very Careful
Since buying PartitionMagic 8.0, I've changed how my computer's XP drive is partitioned from a single partition to seven partitions.  I've created, destroyed, moved, resized, copied and hidden various partitions at one time or another.  On that SATA drive, I've only had one problem with PM:  when I copied a partition, for some reason it moved all my other partitions around unexpectedly.  I don't know why it did that, but it was probably my fault.  If I had paid closer attention to the tasks PM was telling me it was going to do, I would have noticed the odd behavior and cancelled the action.  That \\"paying attention\\" thing is extremely important when using this software.  I've never done any permanent harm with it, but I've done several things accidently that I could have avoided if I had just put more thought into what I was telling PM to do.  If you do use this program, I highly recommend you research every action you intend to do and double-check exactly what PM thinks you want it to do.  It's very easy to make a serious mistake with this software.  Make backups before you do anything. <br /> <br />On my primary hard drive, I really have no complaint with PM.  However, I'm not quite satisfied with it on my external USB drive.  The interesting thing is that according to the documentation file, Partition Magic isn't even supposed to work on USB drives if it can't do all activities entirely within Windows (i.e., if it has to reboot to finish the job, it's not supposed to work).  Yet, before I researched that topic, I had copied my active XP partition to the USB drive (which had to be done in \\"DOS\\" mode).  The one real problem I've had with PM is when I tried to resize the single partition on that USB drive while in XP:  half-way through the resizing, it gave me an \\"Error #11117\\" message and just restored everything to the way it was.  I ended up moving my data off the drive, repartitioning it using XP's Disk Management console, and putting the data back.  I couldn't find any information anywhere to explain that error message.  Since then, I've used PM to add, delete, copy, and hide partitions on that drive without problem.  So, I'm not certain what the problem was. <br /> <br />If you know what you're doing with your partitions and can bear the risk of really messing yourself up, I give this program a decent rating of 3 stars out of 5.  But, if you don't know what you're doing and have a tendency to just try anything without researching it, you might want to hold off on this program (or any like it) unless you're truly desperate.