Partitions have been something of a pain from the day they first started to be used on PCs, mainly because you couldn't change them after you'd started loading files on a drive. If you're one of those people who likes to put the operating system on drive C and applications on drive D, you may have hit a brick wall when your OS partition turned out to be too small for a new operating system (which isn't that hard when going from DOS to Windows 95 or NT).  If only you could change the sizes of your partitions…but up until recently you couldn't. PowerQuest's Partition Magic not only solves that problem but has some other benefits as well.
   Don't let the looks of this screen fool you Partition Magic is actually a DOS program which has the "look and feel" of Windows 95, and it will also work with IBM OS/2, Windows NT or even Linux.

  Partition Magic has all sorts of options to let you resize partitions  not only normal DOS ones but extended partitions and those created for other file systems like HPFS and NTFS  change cluster sizes and customize partitions in other ways.  MicroHelp's Uninstaller Mover is included to help move applications to a different partition, and IBM's Boot Manager is also included to make it easy to use multiple operating systems even if they don't normally "multi-boot" each other.
   Partition Magic 3 also supports the new FAT32 file system used with the OEM Service Release 2 of Windows 95 (and which will also be used by Windows 98), allowing you to convert painlessly to FAT32 (or even convert back to FAT16 if need be).  This may be the biggest attraction for OSR2 users, since doing this lets you have a single partition of over 8 Gb without the waste of disk space caused by cluster sizes that are too large.  (Windows 98 will include a FAT32 converter, but even then Partition Magic will be useful for many other tasks.)
   There's a trick that I came up with, made possible by Partition Magic, that made Windows' swap file even more efficient. As you can see in the screen shot, I created a separate partition (on my fastest drive) that is two and a half times the size of my system memory (40 Mb on a 16 Mb system).  Then I used Partition Magic's cluster size control to change that partition to use 32K clusters; this speeds up disk access on that partition but isn't wasteful because the partition is going to be filled by one file anyway.  Finally I created a permanent swap file on that drive. In Windows 95 (or 98) this is done by going to System Properties, selecting Performance and then Virtual Memory, selecting the option to "specify my own virtual memory
   Settings," and then changing the drive and setting both the minimum and maximum values as high as they will go.  In Windows 3.1 you'd select 386 Enhanced in the Control Panel and adjust virtual memory settings there, again to create a permanent swap file that fills that drive.  With this setup access to the swap file is dramatically improved, both because Windows won't waste time resizing the swap file and because of the 32K cluster size.
   There is one "gotcha" in Partition Magic  you can't run it from the partition that you're working on. PowerQuest's solution to the problem is a slimmed-down version, PQMAGICT.EXE, that you can run from a diskette; it has all the core functions of Partition Magic but isn't as pretty to look at.

   Connect to the PowerQuest Web Site