Using Partition Magic 5®

This document will show how to use Partition Magic® 5 to customize and partition your harddrive as you see fit.

Table of contents

	Introduction to PartitionMagic®
	Settings and configuration
	Brief File System overview
	Short list of the tasks that you can acomplish using PartitionMagic®
	Examples
	About this document

Introduction to PartitionMagic®

PartitionMagic® is the so called "The Standard in Hard Drive Partitionning". You don't have to be a PC guru in order to partition your hard drive as you imagine! PowerQuest® the makers of PartitionMagic® made your job as easy as turning ON your PC!

PartitionMagic® is a very advanced tool unlike the built-in tools that ship with MS-DOS or Windows NT.

MS-DOS's partitioning tool:



Windows's NT Partitioning tool:



*Below is a picture of how PartionMagic® look like:*



As you noticed PartitionMagic® looks ways ways more advanced and user-friendly!

Settings and configuration

There is not really much to configure before starting to use PartitionMagic® Note: It is recommended that you close all applications before operating with PartitionMagic®

Just make sure to check mark the 'Skip bad sector checks' from Disk1 so all the operations that we will be doing won't take so long. If you have multiple hard drives plugged in, you can set one of them to Read-Only so you can make sure you never mess it up by mistake.

Below is a picture of the Preference dialog:



After you've made this check mark as showed in the figure, press OK.

Brief File System overview

There is lots of file systems and they vary from Operating system to operating system.

Note:

Windows 95 and Windows NT 4 can support FAT32 just by installing appropriate software.

visit: www.wininternals.com and get FAT32 for Windows NT or Windows 9x.

Below is a picture of file systems legend in PartitionMagic®

	FAT	File system for use by MS-DOS. It can be maximum of 2GB.
	FAT32	File system used by Windows 95 SR2, 98 and NT. It's an enhanced version of the FAT. It can have a size of up to 2 terabytes!
	NTFS	File system developed by Microsoft for use by Windows NT. It was designed to run fast and with virtually no space allocation limitation.
	HPFS	HPS (High Performance File System), for use by OS/2, but Windows NT 3.x can use this partition.
	Linux Ext2	File system developed for Linux OS.
	Linux Swap	Also designed for Linux but it's used for Swap file.
	Extended
	Used	PartitionMagic® uses this color to visualize the used space in a certain partition. Refer to figure #1.
	Unused	Unused or UnAllocated disk space. Usually new un-partitioned hard drives look like that.

This picture shows both Unallocated space and used space.

After this short overview, you can decide what partition you want to use and you can tell if your data will fit on that partition.

Short list of the tasks that you can acomplish using PartitionMagic®

Basically, PartitionMagic® was designed with all features to meet your demands.

Resize existing partitions on the fly! Convert from a File system to another File system (ie. FAT to FAT32) Hide Partitions Activate Partitions (Make it active and boot from it if it's bootable) Create New Primary or Extended partition Duplicate Partition (Allows you to make an exact copy of an exisiting partition) Change cluster sizes Format partition And more....

Examples

Example #1: Resizing Partitions

Highlight your partition (select the partition you want to resize)

Choose from the menu: Operations/(Resize / Mode)

In the dialog, enter the new desired size of the partition (make sure that there is enough unpartitioned space)

Now, drag and resize the partition, or enter the size manually in the 'New Size' field:

Then click OK to accept these changes.

When you finally finish all changes make sure you press on the apply button in the toolbaras shown:

Or press the same one which is in green:

This document was written by elias bachaalany.
Comments, Questions, Suggestions are welcome.