Partition Magic 8
 

I am looking to partition my hard drive so I can install Linux in addition to Windows. Should I buy Partition Magic 8, or would a demo version work? Since I am a new newbie they won't let me post URLs yet. The demo I was looking at can be found by searching Google for "partition magic 8.0" (with the parenthesis), it is the first result.

uh... i would think that most distros would include disk druid (or some other partitioning tool) so you could set up partitions to install linux in. I know, disk druid came with redhat 7.3 and i used that to make space for a linux install. maybe things have changed, though, i dunno.

as far as the demo version of partition magic, i don't think the demo will let you actually save changes made to your hard drive. that's just what i heard though.

Only the full PM version will let you make permanent changes, not the demo.

Mandrake's partitioning tool will allow you to resize NTFS and FAT partitions, not sure about other distros. If you have the latest Mdk disks you could get as far as the partitioning and then stop and use whichever distro you want.

I'm a total newbie but, starting from an XP system with 1 large NTFS partition, what I did was:

- Defragged XP
- downloaded the iso of System Rescue CD from http://www.sysresccd.org/download.en.php
- Burned this to a cd
- This gave a bootable CD, with QTParted on it.
- Booted to the CD, used QTParted to shrink the XP partition
- Then used my distro (Slackware 9.1) setup to setup the new partitions in the space - in the case of Slackware, they use fdisk, or cfdisk

This worked, and it's all free (as in beer, not just speech)

Thanks for the info. I have a friend that recently installed Red Hat 9.0 and he recommended it. I was going to install that distribution and it doesn’t come with a practitioner, right?

it does and a fine one at that. Disk Druid. Although I did all the redistribution of space before with pmagic. It is doenloadable and free in certain unmentionable places on the web. and comes with boot nagic which is a nice multi boot thingy

boot magic blows. when i tried it, it fscked everything up. made me have to put in a boot floppy to fix the bootloader.

distros like redhat and mandrake have a partitioner built into the install process. I had partition magic before hand and made a boot disk with it on which comes in handy alot. It's way easier and has more features than fdisk, but I wouldn't buy it just for this. Of course there's always kazaa....