I've had trouble with Symantec products before, so I was hesitant to take the plunge with the Symantec version of Partition Magic. But I needed to do some surgery on my laptop's hard drive and I figured PM would do it. I was wrong; the money I spent on this product was wasted.

Similar to another reviewer, I had a dual-boot machine, with Win XP and Mandrake Linux. I suspect that the Mandrake partition tool created some problems in the partition table, but I thought the whole point of a tool like Partition Magic was to fix these. I was already resigned to wiping my disk and reinstalling the OS, but all Partition Magic would do was to report an error. Tech support at Symantec told me to "boot DOS and run FDISK." Why can't PM, whose sole purpose is to manage partitions, recreate a partition table for me?

If your system is up and running, then this tool may help you manage your partitions. But if you are starting from scratch, then PM does nothing.

Since buying PartitionMagic 8.0, I've changed how my computer's XP drive is partitioned from a single partition to seven partitions. I've created, destroyed, moved, resized, copied and hidden various partitions at one time or another. On that SATA drive, I've only had one problem with PM: when I copied a partition, for some reason it moved all my other partitions around unexpectedly. I don't know why it did that, but it was probably my fault. If I had paid closer attention to the tasks PM was telling me it was going to do, I would have noticed the odd behavior and cancelled the action. That "paying attention" thing is extremely important when using this software. I've never done any permanent harm with it, but I've done several things accidently that I could have avoided if I had just put more thought into what I was telling PM to do. If you do use this program, I highly recommend you research every action you intend to do and double-check exactly what PM thinks you want it to do. It's very easy to make a serious mistake with this software. Make backups before you do anything.

On my primary hard drive, I really have no complaint with PM. However, I'm not quite satisfied with it on my external USB drive. The interesting thing is that according to the documentation file, Partition Magic isn't even supposed to work on USB drives if it can't do all activities entirely within Windows (i.e., if it has to reboot to finish the job, it's not supposed to work). Yet, before I researched that topic, I had copied my active XP partition to the USB drive (which had to be done in "DOS" mode). The one real problem I've had with PM is when I tried to resize the single partition on that USB drive while in XP: half-way through the resizing, it gave me an "Error #11117" message and just restored everything to the way it was. I ended up moving my data off the drive, repartitioning it using XP's Disk Management console, and putting the data back. I couldn't find any information anywhere to explain that error message. Since then, I've used PM to add, delete, copy, and hide partitions on that drive without problem. So, I'm not certain what the problem was.

If you know what you're doing with your partitions and can bear the risk of really messing yourself up, I give this program a decent rating of 3 stars out of 5. But, if you don't know what you're doing and have a tendency to just try anything without researching it, you might want to hold off on this program (or any like it) unless you're truly desperate.

I upgraded to 8.0.5, needing to do some maintenence on my boot drive, so I tried to boot from the PM floppies, but PM wouldn't run from floppy with an error 91. Going to the web site, I find that Symantec charges $30 for a tech support phone call!

I've been using Partition Magic since ver 3.0. It's always lived up to it's expectations and has been a great product. Version 8.0 performed for me just as well. I had my new Dell's 160GB drive split into 3 partitions in under 15 minutes after installing the software. All in all, good stuff. I read all the reviews before buying, and I'll admit that I was worried after reading all the stuff about Symantec doing the hostile takeover gig. That being said, the only thing I have trouble with about this software is the total lack of printed documentation. I realize that this is the way things are done nowadays, but the lack thereof still sucks.

I remember Powerquest Partition Magic 2.0, back in the days when it was released as an OS/2 *and* MS-DOS utility you could boot and use from a set of two diskettes. I got hands-on experience with Partition Magic up to version 7, in my view their "last good" version (the best was version 3.0).

Slowly they started dropping features over time, like HPFS file system support, for no apparent reason (hey: there are some NT4 systems still running on HPFS to this day!).

Soon after version 8 was released, the corporation dubbed Symantec -which I like to refer to as "Engulf and Devour"- bought powerquest and while I no longer used it, soon I started hearing the complaints about the new "activation scheme" in version 8.x, which insisted on "phoning home" before allowing you to use it.

To boot, when I went to powerquest.com looking for an update that I know was there before the buyout by Symantec for my Partition Magic 7 product, I was redirected to the Symantec.com web page. But when you click on "other versions", you're quickly told that all Powerquest products (that is, any partition magic version < 8) are "obsolete" and "unsupported". They got rid of all the updates for PQMagic versions 3 to 7. Obviously Symantec is only interested in new sales and the dollars, not supporting former Powerquest customers (Partition Magic 7.0 is even listed and in stock for sale on Amazon.com!).

PQMagic and Powerquest Drive Image have been always superior to Symantec's Ghost products. Yet now Symantec bundles the inferior Norton Ghost in a bundle with Partition Magic 8.

It's sad to see such a great company and their products destroyed by Symantec's corporate greed. Welcome to the Symantec partition resizing utility monopoly!. Symantec got rid of their main competitor and destroyed a product in the process. It's just sad. For a good partition resizer check out V-Com's Partition Commander, and for disk imaging, I now use Acronis TrueImage. Both are for sale here in Amazon.com. Check those out before giving your money to the Symantec juggernaut.