PCSA Sep 2001 - Hard disk partition managers

Hard DiskPartition Managersn a workstation or server support environment one of the most time-consumingA variety of software toolsjobs can be the process of partition resizing and/or conversion. For serversare available which allow Iespecially, system downtime must be kept to a minimum, so a tool that willspeed up this process is to be welcomed. In the relatively early days of the PC thesupport staff to non-only way to manage partitions was by use of the FDISK program as supplied withdestructively manage users’ MS-DOS. Unfortunately this was (and still is) extremely limited in functionality -partition resizing for example was impossible without first destroying the existinghard disk partitions. We take partition(s), so necessitating the backup of any required data beforehand followedby a full restore.alookatwhat’saround.Partitions could be added using any remaining drive space but, depending on whereBy Phil Morris the space was on the hard drive, the size of the new partition might be limited or itmight have been necessary to make a few small partitions instead of the requiredTechnical Writersingle large one.With the advent of commercial partition management software, such limitations area thing of the past and the support technician has far more flexibility in what can beachieved in terms of partition resizing, deletion, movement, conversion of one filesystem or partition type to another, merging of data between two partitions and soon. Arguably the ...