Partition Logic

[Frank Bohan]

This one looks good:

<quote> Partition Logic is a free hard disk partitioning and data management
tool. It can create, delete, format, defragment, resize, and move
partitions and modify their attributes. It can copy entire hard disks from
one to another. Partition Logic is free software, based on the Visopsys
operating system. It boots from a CD or floppy disk and runs as a
standalone system, independent of your regular operating system. It is
intended to become a free alternative to such commercial programs as
Partition Magic, Drive Image, and Norton Ghost...</quote>

http://partitionlogic.org.uk/index.html

===

Frank Bohan
¶ Schizophrenics are never alone.

 

[Terry]

This one looks good:

<quote> Partition Logic is a free hard disk partitioning and data management
tool. It can create, delete, format, defragment, resize, and move
partitions and modify their attributes. It can copy entire hard disks from
one to another. Partition Logic is free software, based on the Visopsys
operating system. It boots from a CD or floppy disk and runs as a
standalone system, independent of your regular operating system. It is
intended to become a free alternative to such commercial programs as
Partition Magic, Drive Image, and Norton Ghost...</quote>

http://partitionlogic.org.uk/index.html

This has been mentioned quite a few times on ACF. Note the
limitations:

<quote>
Partition logic does not currently support the following:

* Partitioning of SCSI hard disks, and some SATA hard disks
* Non MS-DOS/MBR-style partition tables (i.e. Sun, BSD, EFI/GPT)
* Formatting filesystems other than FAT and EXT2
* Resizing filesystems other than NTFS (Windows XP filesystems)
* Serial mice
* USB keyboards and mice
* Keyboard layouts other than UK English, US English, Italian, or
German
</quote>

So you can resize but not format NTFS, and format but not resize FAT.

Also, the OS (Viopsys) hasn't got networking implemented yet, let
alone support for all the different network hardware out there, so you
can't move data from your drives to somplace else on your network. Nor
can it handle writing to NTFS partitions.

I prefer to use linux live-cds (eg, SystemRescueCD). They do partition
management, and offer lots of other tools as well. And they boot on
almost anything.

Terry

 

[Chakolate]

This has been mentioned quite a few times on ACF. Note the
limitations:

<quote>
Partition logic does not currently support the following:

* Partitioning of SCSI hard disks, and some SATA hard disks
* Non MS-DOS/MBR-style partition tables (i.e. Sun, BSD, EFI/GPT)
* Formatting filesystems other than FAT and EXT2
* Resizing filesystems other than NTFS (Windows XP filesystems)
* Serial mice
* USB keyboards and mice
* Keyboard layouts other than UK English, US English, Italian, or
German
</quote>

So you can resize but not format NTFS, and format but not resize FAT.

Also, the OS (Viopsys) hasn't got networking implemented yet, let
alone support for all the different network hardware out there, so you
can't move data from your drives to somplace else on your network. Nor
can it handle writing to NTFS partitions.

I prefer to use linux live-cds (eg, SystemRescueCD). They do partition
management, and offer lots of other tools as well. And they boot on
almost anything.

Is there something that's easy to use for a complete idiot? I'm on a
Dell machine running Win2KPro, but I've got a second hard drive that's
partitioned into two, and I need it all one drive.

Chak

 

[MyName]

Is there something that's easy to use for a complete idiot?
I'm on a Dell machine running Win2KPro, but I've got a
second hard drive that's partitioned into two, and I need
it all one drive.

Check out the use of fdik.exe & the format command. That is all
you need. Careful which drive you fdisk. If in doubt, disconnect
the boot drive, boot using a boot disk to run fdisk & format.

 

[Chakolate]

Check out the use of fdik.exe & the format command. That is all
you need. Careful which drive you fdisk. If in doubt, disconnect
the boot drive, boot using a boot disk to run fdisk & format.

The trouble is that I have one hard drive partitioned into two drives.
The '1' drive is partitioned into 'G' and 'H'. So when I use fdisk, it
will format 'G' or 'H' but I don't know how to get it to format the '1'
drive.

I hope that's clear, it's hard to describe this problem. '1' is 'one'.

Chak

 

[Terry]

The trouble is that I have one hard drive partitioned into two drives.
The '1' drive is partitioned into 'G' and 'H'. So when I use fdisk, it
will format 'G' or 'H' but I don't know how to get it to format the '1'
drive.

I hope that's clear, it's hard to describe this problem. '1' is 'one'.

Your explanation is pretty clear, but you're confused about fdisk.
Fdisk is not format. Fdisk allows you to delete and create partitions.
The format command formats.

On Win2KPro (or XP), you don't need to mess around with dos command
line programs. Just open
Start -> Programs -> Administrative Tools -> Computer management.
Then click on Disk management.

Assuming you are an administrator, from that GUI, you can remove
partitions, create new ones, etc. You can format new partitions from
there, too. Simple, and it shows you exactly what drive and paritions
you have, and which one you are working on.

Warning: if you don't clearly understand thd difference between
formatting a partition and changing (creating, deleting, resizing)
partitions, then STOP, and get some help, or spend more time reading
up on what these operations do. (And from your posting above it seems
you don't understand this.)

Terry

 

[Franklin]

So you can resize but not format NTFS, and format but not resize
FAT.

ISTR that properly formatting NTFS is not so easy. One of my
favorite $$$ware partition management programs does not do a full
format of an NTFS partition but leaves that to something else like
XP.

I do agtree that not resizing FAT seems strange as it is a much
simpler file system than NTFS.

 

[Franklin]

Warning: if you don't clearly understand thd difference between
formatting a partition and changing (creating, deleting,
resizing) partitions, then STOP, and get some help, or spend
more time reading up on what these operations do. (And from your
posting above it seems you don't understand this.)

Terry I wonder if the OP is also mixed up on something else.

He refers to formatting the "1 drive" and yet it appears that he has
two partitions on that hard drive.

There is a certain (unfortunately false) logic to wanting to format a
hard drive before partitioning it and maybe the OP is trying to do
that.

 

[David]

The trouble is that I have one hard drive partitioned into two drives.
The '1' drive is partitioned into 'G' and 'H'. So when I use fdisk, it
will format 'G' or 'H' but I don't know how to get it to format the '1'
drive.

I hope that's clear, it's hard to describe this problem. '1' is 'one'.

Chak

To format the 1 drive you would need to remove the two partitions and
substitute one partition. If you don't want to remove those partitions
then you don't need to format the 1 drive.

By having two partitions you have essentially made your physical
drive, the 1 drive, into two logical drives, your G: and H: drives.
Those are all that need formatting.

 

[Chakolate]

Assuming you are an administrator, from that GUI, you can remove
partitions, create new ones, etc. You can format new partitions from
there, too. Simple, and it shows you exactly what drive and paritions
you have, and which one you are working on.

Warning: if you don't clearly understand thd difference between
formatting a partition and changing (creating, deleting, resizing)
partitions, then STOP, and get some help, or spend more time reading
up on what these operations do. (And from your posting above it seems
you don't understand this.)

Actually, I do, I sort of misspoke before. I don't want to reformat, I
want to repartition. And I never knew the tools you mention were there.
Thanks! I promise I shall read all the help notes available before doing
anything.

Chak

 

[Chakolate]

He refers to formatting the "1 drive" and yet it appears that he has
two partitions on that hard drive.

There is a certain (unfortunately false) logic to wanting to format a
hard drive before partitioning it and maybe the OP is trying to do
that.

This should teach me not to post when I'm tired (but it prolly won't).
What I want to do is to delete a partition on the 1 drive so that the
whole physical drive is one partition (that doesn't sound quite right,
but you prolly know what I mean?)

I'm going to check into what Terry mentioned, carefully.

Chak

 

[Al Klein]

This should teach me not to post when I'm tired (but it prolly won't).
What I want to do is to delete a partition on the 1 drive so that the
whole physical drive is one partition (that doesn't sound quite right,
but you prolly know what I mean?)

You're aware that by doing that you'll lose any files you have on that
drive? There are ways of doing it without losing the files, but
simply repartitioning the drive isn't one of them.

 

[lugnut]

ISTR that properly formatting NTFS is not so easy. One of my
favorite $$$ware partition management programs does not do a full
format of an NTFS partition but leaves that to something else like
XP.

I do agtree that not resizing FAT seems strange as it is a much
simpler file system than NTFS.

The FAT system may be simpler but, for 20 years, every hard
drive crash I ever experienced was on a FAT drive. Four
years ago, I switched everything to NTFS and have not
experienced one hard drive crash since. I have one drive
that has logged over 40K hours with not one glitch with Win
XP. It has been so reliable that I had to do myself a
refresher course over the last weekend to repair a hard
drive crash on my sisters personal machine as a result of a
bug that got by her refusal to maintain her anti software
packages. Once I got the bug cleaned out, I was able to do
an XP repair install and bring the system back to life w/o
losing any of her data. I was never able to do this as
easily with a FAT system.

Lugnut

 

[elaich]

The FAT system may be simpler but, for 20 years, every hard
drive crash I ever experienced was on a FAT drive.

I don't see any way that the file system put on a hard drive makes it
more prone to failure. Failure is always electronic or mechanical. Also,
for 20 years, FAT drives were all you had, so that's all that could fail.

Four years ago, I switched everything to NTFS and have not
experienced one hard drive crash since.

4 years isn't really that long to go without a hard drive failure. The
Western Digital drive that came in the Compaq I bought in 2000 is still
going strong. It's never had anything but FAT32 on it. By contrast, the
Maxtor I bought in 2001 for file storage failed 2 months before the 3
year warranty ran out. The replacement they sent me (a DiamondMax 40 G)
lasted only a year and a half. I just threw it away this morning. It was
only warranted for 90 days.

 

[Chakolate]

You're aware that by doing that you'll lose any files you have on that
drive? There are ways of doing it without losing the files, but
simply repartitioning the drive isn't one of them.

Yeah, I know, but there aren't any files on that drive. It was
partitioned into two logical drives by mistake a long time ago, and I'm
just trying to get it back to being one logical drive.

Which is exactly what happened, BTW, when I followed the instructions to
use disk management on Win2Kpro. Thanks to everybody who replied.

Chak

 

[Howard Schwartz]

The FAT system may be simpler but, for 20 years, every hard
drive crash I ever experienced was on a FAT drive. Four
years ago, I switched everything to NTFS and have not
experienced one hard drive crash since. I have one drive
that has logged over 40K hours with not one glitch with Win
XP.

Just one alternative story, I have used fAT15 and 32 drives now
for almost 20 years, and have not had a single disk crash, even using
older disk hardware -- honest! I know NTFS is touted as better in
many ways, but I have not seen decent real world statistics showing
there is less disk trouble with it, over many people and many years.

AND I have restored partitions and boot records on some really messed up
hard disks I inhereted, using testdisk and dos. There are lots and lots of
good free file and disk recovery tools that work under dos with FAT file
systems. Not so for NTFS, and pretty much only the recovery console as
an emergency OS, when you need to repair an NTFS disk -- not much in the
way of small OSs that fit on a floppy to use, when NTFS is in trouble.
This is the main reason, I have not transferred to NTFS.

Also, NTFS uses a respectable amount of resources and memory.

 

[Howard Schwartz]

don't see any way that the file system put on a hard drive makes it
more prone to failure. Failure is always electronic or mechanical. Also,
for 20 years, FAT drives were all you had, so that's all that could fail.

Lots of things called `crashes' are not directly hardware related, but can
be caused by software failures and problems with boot records, file tables
and other disk data that says what to find what, where.

I file system like NTFS can certain build in more failsave and backup data
mechanisms to prevent, such data-related disk crashes.

 

[Franklin]

Yeah, I know, but there aren't any files on that drive. It was
partitioned into two logical drives by mistake a long time ago,
and I'm just trying to get it back to being one logical drive.

Which is exactly what happened, BTW, when I followed the
instructions to use disk management on Win2Kpro. Thanks to
everybody who replied.

Um, I am not sure you mean a logical (= secondary partition). I
suspect you mean a single primary partition.