"cquirke (MVP Win9x)" said in
First, I'd get BING (Boot It New Generation) from
www.bootitng.com,
which is free for 30 days and at about $30, waaay better value than
Symantec/PowerQuest's Partition Manager.
Okay, went to
http://www.bootitng.com/bootitng.html but don't see a lot
to pull me to another utility that implements 90% or more of the same
features.
Windows XP/2003 Compatible!
- Same for PartitionMagic 8.
IEEE1394/USB 2.0 high speed support for imaging/partitioning.
- This must refer to imaging from DOS (in which they provide USB
drivers) since any USB-attached drive should be reachable if you're
doing this from inside Windows.
support for large hard drives (2 TB) and partitions (1-2 TB).
non-destructive resizing and conversion for FAT/FAT32.
- Only if you are also moving the contents of one partition to another;
read from one, write while converting to the other. Obviously if you
are converting NTFS to FAT32 within the same partition, it must be
destructive. You get the choice of one file system, not two of them
somehow overlapped.
non-destructive resizing for NTFS.
- Same for PartitionMagic if and only if you move the tail end boundary
of the partition. If you move the front end, which is possible in
PartitionMagic (don't know about BING), a feature they didn't have for a
long time until the last one or two versions, then again it must be
destructive because you are moving sectors within the same area of the
disk.
creation and (secure) deletion of partitions/volumes.
- Same for PartitionMagic. I assume secure deletion simply means wiping
the sectors of any data using standard schemes to run through various
patterns. Since there are freebie utilities, like Eraser that will wipe
files and unused disk space, it wouldn't matter if this were missing
from PartitionMagic. However, in PartitionMagic 8, you can Delete or
you can Delete and Secure Erase.
undelete partitions/volumes.
- That's really just defining a partition using the same boundaries as
before. I'd have to do the research again but basically you look for
the sector that used to be sector 0 that had the special attribute byte
values used for boot sectors. There's probably a lot more to it, but
PartitionMagic 8 also has Undelete Partition.
FAT/FAT32 formatting
- Nothing new. PartitionMagic has had this ever since VFAT came out.
copying and moving of partitions/volumes.
- Same for PartitionMagic.
support for Linux Ext2/Ext3 and ReiserFS file systems.
- This means you are switching from a physical copy, move, delete, or
whatever of a partition to a logical read of the partition (i.e.,
reading the files) and then laying them down atop another file system
(may be the same or different). This is how Norton's Ghost runs by
default, a logical read of files. Has lots of problems. Under Windows
NT/2000/XP, you can't restore EFS-protected files because you cannot
open them to read them. That's why you do a physical image by sector.
When modifying partitions physically, it doesn't matter what file system
is used (as long as the partition is larger than the highest sector used
to allocate to a file in that file system).
Imaging (including directly to CD-R/RW or DVD+R+RW-R-RW)
- Nope, PartitionMagic doesn't have that. That's their separate
DriveImage product (i.e., more bucks). However, if this imaging is
logical (as is Ghost by default), screw that since it incurs lots of
problems. It had better do a physical disk image. It would also be
nice if it skipped (but recorded) empty/unused sectors as does
DriveImage (Ghost, when switched into physical disk image mode, records
all sectors, even the unused ones, so you end up with a huge image file
full of empty sector information).
booting any partition on any hard drive
- Same for PartitionMagic - because it comes bundled with BootMagic.
Once you replace the bootstrap program in the MBR, you can do a lot more
than the standard one. There is limited space in sector 0 for the MBR
(and even less for the bootstrap program since the partition table is
part of the MBR). So usually they have enough intelligence to know
where to find the rest of their program and run it from there. This
incurs a limitation in BootMagic in that the remainder of its files must
be in a FAT partition (which must also be one the first hard drive since
the partition table in the MBR in sector 0 of the first physically
detected hard drive can only point to partitions on that same hard
disk). I suppose you could chain bootstrap programs in the MBRs across
hard disk if you didn't care about stability.
booting from the CD ROM drive
- PartitionMagic does that, too. DriveImage does, too.
booting multiple operating systems from a single partition.
- That's new? The boot managers replace the bootstrap program in the
MBR. It loads its program in whatever partition it got installed. It
then is no longer limited to booting using only the partitions in the
partition table in the MBR of the first detected physical hard drive
(which is all that the BIOS bootstrap program can reach). It can then
access any partition on any drive. I've been able to do that with
PartitionMagic many versions ago for many years.
create over 200 primary partitions (if desired).
- Again, once you load a boot manager, it takes over control of the
bootstrap program in the MBR. The partition table in the MBR only has
four entries, but that doesn't stop your boot manager from loading its
program in the boostrap area of the MBR, using the standard 4-entry
partition table in the MBR to find the rest of its files, and then
having a separate proprietary partition table that it then manages.
user id and password protection.
- Same for BootMagic that comes with PartitionMagic. It has the
password protection. I don't know what is meant by a "user id". I
suppose you could have different partitions get booted depending on who
logged into the boot manager. George gets Windows 98 in one partition
while Martha gets Windows XP in a different partition. Not a bad idea
on a multi-user host. BootMagic has password protection but don't
recall it having a user id list (but which would need some security
measures to provide for admin accounts who are the only ones allowed to
manage this user id list in the boot manager).
free upgrades (1.00-1.99) (registration-key versions only)
- Those are correctly referred to as "updates", not "upgrades".
Anything within the same major version are updates. Most software gives
you this. Nortons, Powerquest, Microsoft, etc. You frequently find
there are updates to your software and you simply download and install
them for free.
If I already didn't have PartitionMagic and DriveImage, this might prove
to be a contender. And now that the biggest software predator in
existence, Symantec, has gobbled up Powerquest, and because Symantec is
a software publisher first and software developer last, alternatives to
PartitionMagic w/BootMagic and DriveImage will get more noticed.
