Anyone have any experience with either MiniTool Free Partition Wizard or Easeus Partition Master Free? Pros/Cons?? Or, is there a better free option?
I used to use Easeus but I have found that MiniTools and PartitionGuru do a better job and can easily be run as a portable.
I have been very happy with MiniTools, which I "installed" as Portable on a non-system partition for use by either XP or Win7 on my dual boot Laptop.
It is also a good idea to download their free ISO for a Boot CD which can be used when Windows will not boot or does not exist.
MInitools is good but it cannot merge partitions if I am not mistaken.
MInitools is good but it cannot merge partitions if I am not mistaken.
Quite right, and the other app you ask about Tom, Easeus, can merge partitions, so I have both of them installed, as well as Partition Guru. And I have the MiniTools boot CD.
I've discovered with experience that some of these programs can carry out the same operation better than others, such as searching for missing partitions, or turning a small area of "unallocated space" into a partition to enable it to be merged.
It's surprising how they all claim to do similar things but each of them aren't totally proficient with all their features, which is why I have a more than one installed. I got myself out of a serious partition mess up recently by using more than one partition manager.
PartitionGuru recently got rid of an undeletable corrupt folder (created by a partitioning process) by unmounting the partition it was on, deleting the object, and then mounted the partition again. Prior to discovering that cool trick, I'd tried deleting this folder using Unlocker, MBAM's File Assassin, Safe Mode and booting the computer with BartPE.
Nothing would shift that folder, but PartitionGuru did.
In these days of large drives, and the partitioning that usually goes with them, having more than one Partition Manager is worth the relatively small amount of space they take up.
Thanks for the insight, Dennis. When installing these apps, can they be installed on the system drive or should they be installed on a drive other than the "target" drive?
By the way, I just installed MiniTool Partition Wizard Home 7.1 to take a look at it and found that in the "Partition" tab drop down menu there is a "Merge" option. Based on what's been said so far in this thread, does this option not work?
Thanks for the insight, Dennis. When installing these apps, can they be installed on the system drive or should they be installed on a drive other than the "target" drive? By the way, I just installed MiniTool Partition Wizard Home 7.1 to take a look at it and found that in the "Partition" tab drop down menu there is a "Merge" option. Based on what's been said so far in this thread, does this option not work?
It should always be safe to instal any partition manager on the system drive.
It cannot do any damage to itself without also damaging Windows, and that just should not happen.
Minitool also takes special care of any other partition it may may be held in.
I think it does this by rebooting into a chunk of code in RAM.
I would like to think that every Partition Manager would be this good.
I am not optimistic.
If you click on Merge then a pop-up tells you it is not supported on the free home edition, and gives a link to their comparison chart.
N.B. I think you can click on anything - no damage is done, no changes are made,
you only append to a list of "Operations Appending", UNTIL you click APPLY and then it all happens.
Thanks so much for the clarifications, Alan.
By the way, do you think any one of these apps is better than another one at converting a FAT32 external drive to NTFS?
I advise copying what you value and then a fresh format to NTFS.
Have to leave now. Will explain later about alignment etc.
My experience with XP Home Edition was that FAT32 partitions had 512 byte cluster sizes, and NTFS partitions had 4096 byte clusters.
Disc management could convert from FAT32 to NTFS. I cannot remember if it promised to retain data, but I think it did so promise.
There were warnings that the NTFS result retained 512 clusters which were not optimum
Minitools 4.2 or therabouts also could convert, and did promise to retain data. I found no info on subsequent cluster size.
I tried it and no data was lost, but it was in 512 clusters.
I gave up and did a total NTFS default format of the partition, destroying all data, and then copied back my archive.
I recommend TeraCopy as a reliable file copy utility - it performs checksums and allows retries if you wish - useful with dodgy USB transfers.
There are different opinions on what is the optimum size,
and I do not remember all the details of why I felt 4096 cluster size was worth the effort - but I went for it and do not regret it.
I forget the details, but I think the MBR is on the first sector, and there is a partition table as well.
FAT32 uses all the sectors apart from the first 3 sectors.
NTFS uses all the sectors apart from the first 4 sectors,
therefore by default it cannot include the third sector,
so if you convert to retain data in that third sector it has to drop from 4096 to 512 byte sizes.
If you Google for this you get "About 520,000 results (0.28 seconds"
ntfs fat32 alignment
This result looks promising, post #9 refers to a tool that will convert fat32 into 4096, but perhaps it destroys the data
Don't forget you can use the Windows built in conversion tool to change from Fat32 to NTFS
More info here
http://technet.micro...e/ee851683.aspx
http://technet.micro...e/ee851683.aspx
Sorry, I actually meant by Disc Management the facility that is built into Windows XP Home.
After 1 year's use of Win7 and absence from XP I forget what XP Home called it.
I also found that when you had an NTFS partition with clusters smaller than 4KB (default) things slowed down to a crawl.