best partition utility for a SATA hard drive

[Ulysses]

Ello peeps, I am wanting to partition my hard drive which is a SATA hard drive so I can run both XP and Vista..what do you recommend and why?

[TetsuoShima]

the easiest is to just use windows setup to create a primary partition (smaller than full size) and create new partitions from within windows later on.

 

If you want to keep your data and can't backup it somewhere, that previous option won't work.

 

It used to be so that partitionmagic was the best/easiest on the market utility. It's still acceptable, but it's missing a few features.

 

imo, one of the best available utilities atm is Paragon Partition Manager, but it is quite expensive... Not immediately something an ordinary consumer would buy because of price. It will do nearly anything you could possibly want it to do though.

[Megalith]

I use Acronis Disk Director Suite a million times better than partition manager and packed full of features:-

• 
  [+] Create Partitions
  [+] Resize Partitions
  [+] Copy/Move Partitions
  [+] Delete Partitions
  [+] Recover deleted Partitions
  [+]farmat, label, hide/unhide Partitions
  [+]View logs
  [+] Install multiple OS
  [+] Boot from any hard disk partition
  [+] Boot installed OS from under windows
  [+] Install several OS on a single partition
  [+] Hide or password protect any OS on your PC
  [+] Duplicate installed OS and define different configs for each copy
  [+] Recover boot records, files and folder structure, find lost clusters, remove viruses
  

 

heres a link to the website.

 

[S0V13T]

call me a traditionalist, but I've only really needed fdisk for this sort of thing.

 

Partition Magic is a decent program too, I understand. I don't know how or why, but I have a partition Magic tshirt in my closet right now.

[bones2097]

yeah partition magic too... used it at home (IDE), and in office (SATA), works a charm.......

 

Fdisk will do the job but to be honest, i been using PM first and really can't be arsed to read how to use fdisk...

 

a gui is what i need!!!!

[NiteShdw]

I use Hiren's BootCD.  It has copies of a number of different partitioning programs.  You can boot the CD, shrink your existing XP partition, then create a new partition for Vista.

 

I was able to get a Vista key through my work's MSDN account.  I have a RAID 0 on 2 SATA drives.  There aren't any Vista drivers for my nVIDIA card, but I could run the install within windows XP and use the XP drivers to install on another partition.  Since both are NTFS, sharing programs and files between the two OS's is no problem.

 

So far, Vista's drivers are bit too buggy, but I'm still using it.  I turned off UAC (damn that was annoying).  Anyway, I'm getting off topic.

[dr_strekge]

I have to check out that Paragon PM one day... thanks TS

 

I recently "phish" my first 320GB  seagate "ugly phish" :D Now I have a three floor "building" thing right next to my rear uncovered case, and I made myself  a similar question. I started with my SUPERBOOT CD, using Partition Magic for Dos, but it partially stalls before completing the graphical operation, despite of that it does the job in the end. After a 'hard' reset :p. (it was more a 'gently' reset one, I don't panic anymore... maybe for a few seconds :) and I think of me as an expert partitioner)

 

As I was saying, after reseting: It created a big NTFS slice, then I installed XP and all was O.K. After that and once I got the windows desktop I installed Norton Partition Magic 8.05, another  very good  tool for all the major slicing tasks involving SATA hard drives.

 

But I like Acronis Partition Expert 2003, and I also use it regularly, it seems and actually is faster for several more complex lists of partitioning operations, and can copy my HPFS little partition "naturally" (and any other bsdi, ext3, etcetera)  It certainly computes quietly with my needs, well almost...  ;D read what follows below to understand why.

 

Acronis seems more like a PTS BootWizard's FDISK remake, and I remember having the one disk floppy Acroni's partitioner for dos in the past, and it was good too (after inserting certain required letters sequence :p after the first time boot with it) 

 

What I mean here  is with PE Media Builder one can 'build' the floppy version of Acronis PE but I have not been able yet :) to burn any bootable CD. It maybe sound silly but its because I have a DVD-RW unit not just an old CD-RW...Which means if you can have Acronis PE booting from a CD or better, from a DVD: You can have a good partitioning tool that not requires to be in windows to slice your SATA disks the way you want (the floppy version use 4 floppies. BTW I know this topic is a little bit old but my recent experiences with my SATA disk is new, is refreshing to this topic).

 

For the opensource alternative try cfdisk, GParted or Parted Magic programs, and Grub as standalone in a data partition (good for not intermissive and relatively safe multi OS booting) as is described here:

 

http://www.justlinux.com/forum/showthread.php?threadid=147959

 

(this requires mainly testing on an empty hard disk or virtual hdd, prior to attempt a formal 'final' sliced disk layout, and of course disconnecting as a precaution all hard disks containing your valuable data. (<- not daytah just "dahrah", do you? - do you remembuh? :p "whutavah!" B) u 'TNG walker'  :p )