mart360

Can anyone reccomend any free partitioning proggys/ utils,

i want to try some alternate OS's to see if i can resolve a problem


Mart

Sonic'

Not sure about free ones, but I bought Partition Manager, same as Partition Magic but 10x cheaper

Or certainly was when I bought it a few years ago, if you say you are in the US you dont pay VAT either

spectrum48k

acronis are top notch for partitioning software
Backup software for data backup and disaster recovery in Windows and Linux - Acronis

her's some free stuff
Free Partition Editors, Managers and Recovery (Partitioning Software) (thefreecountry.com)

Luminous

iTrader: (3)

Another vote for Acronis. Disk Director is great at partitioning stuff. Although the last version was not compatible with Vista. Should you create and format a partition for a Vista install, when Vista installs it corrupts, and also corrupts other OS partitions on your drive. It was some deliberate MS decision to make 3rd party partitioning software fail It caused a major issue for me, as it took a long time to work out what the issue was.

Acronis also do True Image, which can make a compressed image of an OS partition you have working, and make that image without the need to reboot your machine.

Finally, OSL2000 is an amazing boot manager. It lives entirely in the MBR, and therefore does not depend on any other partition to boot your machine. Each time your machine boots it scans (in an instant) which partitions are bootable and presents a menu. SO much better than anything else i have tried. Its free to test, then makes you wait longer and longer at the boot screen until you buy it.

Other boot managers always seem to need to have bits installed into one of the bootable partitions. So should that partition become hidden, or move or whatever then the whole house of cards comes crashing down around your ears

phoenixgold

iTrader: (2)

What OS are you currently running? Do you have free space already or do you need to shrink the current partition?

Vista does have it's own partition shrink util. It's on the boot disk. I used it when I needed to install XP on my laptop that came with vista.

FIPS was a good util to shrink partitions. If you don't need to shrink, then all OS's come with their own tools to manage disk partitions.

Dream Weaver

Acronis here also, very good.