Thrax
13 May 2006, 12:54am
One area of my computer that usually goes ignored is the state of my hard drives; my drives are characteristically exhibit fragmentation 80% or above because I'm simply very lazy when it comes to taking care of menial tasks like this on my PC.
Lately I was presented with the task of merging five partitions on a single 120GB disk together; I'm a stickler for organisation, and these partitions have ably served the size demands I've placed on them for 3+ years. Lately, however, my game drive has been running out of room, and with the LAN looming on the horizon, that's one thing I didn't want to face, so it was time to merge them.
Partition Magic 8 had been my old standby for any partition merging/splitting requirements, but on this task, no matter how many times I defragged (back to that in a moment) or ran chkdsk, it said it couldn't complete the task. POPPYCOCK!
Shorty has been extolling the virtues of the Acronis company for some time now, and I found they have an application called Disk Director that performs the same functions as Partition Magic. I thought I'd give it a shot, but before I did that, I wanted to make sure my partitions were in proper order and properly defragmented.
We all know the Windows defragmenter sucks.. Even after it's done, it leaves little red lines of fragmentation everywhere, and that really cheesed me off. I dashed off to Google to find a better defragmenting app, not having been pleased with Diskkeeper. I ran across a program called PerfectDisk by a company called Raxco. After doing the first partition with this program, I knew it was a keeper. Everything was lined up so neatly and beautifully, it blew the native defragger for XP out of the water. So I defragged all my disks with it, rebooted, and got prepared to merge.
Acronis' interfaces with chkdsk, and I ran that on all my defragged partitions before I started the process. A couple drives had tiny errors that Acronis corrected, and I was ready to start merging! I have to say that the process was very quick and trouble-free. No scary errors, no glitches, no hiccups.. Just ~15 minutes per merge procedure, and it was done.
I have to say I'm really impressed with both these programs. Just thought I'd toss those out there. :)
Your friendly local Raxco and Acronis Vice-Shill,
Thraxy-poo
Lately I was presented with the task of merging five partitions on a single 120GB disk together; I'm a stickler for organisation, and these partitions have ably served the size demands I've placed on them for 3+ years. Lately, however, my game drive has been running out of room, and with the LAN looming on the horizon, that's one thing I didn't want to face, so it was time to merge them.
Partition Magic 8 had been my old standby for any partition merging/splitting requirements, but on this task, no matter how many times I defragged (back to that in a moment) or ran chkdsk, it said it couldn't complete the task. POPPYCOCK!
Shorty has been extolling the virtues of the Acronis company for some time now, and I found they have an application called Disk Director that performs the same functions as Partition Magic. I thought I'd give it a shot, but before I did that, I wanted to make sure my partitions were in proper order and properly defragmented.
We all know the Windows defragmenter sucks.. Even after it's done, it leaves little red lines of fragmentation everywhere, and that really cheesed me off. I dashed off to Google to find a better defragmenting app, not having been pleased with Diskkeeper. I ran across a program called PerfectDisk by a company called Raxco. After doing the first partition with this program, I knew it was a keeper. Everything was lined up so neatly and beautifully, it blew the native defragger for XP out of the water. So I defragged all my disks with it, rebooted, and got prepared to merge.
Acronis' interfaces with chkdsk, and I ran that on all my defragged partitions before I started the process. A couple drives had tiny errors that Acronis corrected, and I was ready to start merging! I have to say that the process was very quick and trouble-free. No scary errors, no glitches, no hiccups.. Just ~15 minutes per merge procedure, and it was done.
I have to say I'm really impressed with both these programs. Just thought I'd toss those out there. :)
Your friendly local Raxco and Acronis Vice-Shill,
Thraxy-poo