Partition Manager
We have taken a look at some of the software available to help you create, manager, backup and recover partitions on your desktop computer.
Paragon's Partition Manager
Sooner or later every computer owner is going come across a hard disk management task. By ensuring that you have an optimum allocation of disk resources is key to managing data and operating systems on your computer effectively.
Paragon's Partition Manager has won awards and provides easy and reliable hard drive partitioning and full-range hard disk management. It enables you to create, copy, resize and move hard drive partitions. This product is suitable for both home and professional use.
Paragon Partition Manager - Pro Edition
With Paragon's "Partition Manager - Professional Edition", IT Professionals are able to get optimum performance from workstations, automate system management, save time, and last but not least reduce maintenance costs of their IT systems.
The Pro Edition includes wizards for the usual operations, as well as the possibility to save and edit scheduled tasks, and a Professional Recovery CD. A powerful script generator helps to create and run scripts to automate common partitioning tasks.
To maximise system performance, Partition Manager Professional Edition also provides
a powerful defragment utility and the ability to dynamically adjust cluster sizes, thereby significantly increasing system speed.
Paragon Partition Manager - Server Edition
Paragon "Partition Manager - Server Edition" enables IT Professionals to create,
format, resize, merge, undelete, move, copy, defragment and convert safely
and quickly partitions for storing valuable company information, data files,
applications, and operating systems. Partition Manager Server Edition is fast,
easy to use and very flexible. The new Partition Explorer allows to move
files from one partition to another regardless of partition type improving
thus data management in multiple file system configurations like Linux and
Windows®.
Includes BootManager to automatically install and run multiple operating systems,
wizards to ease redistribute free space, merge or undelete partitions, and a
recovery CD. A powerful script generator helps to create and run scripts to
automate common partitioning task.
Partition recovery
Here's an excellent solution if you have got a partition that needs urgent attention. "Diskpatch" is an easy to use DOS utility that repairs the disk structures that describe your "hard disk layout". DiskPatch can recover and undelete lost or deleted partitions, and repair boot sectors.
DiskPatch can also be used to: backup & restore your disk layout (partition tables, boot sectors or the LDM on Dynamic Disks), edit your disk, scan for surface errors and possibly fix them, wipe or "low level format" a hard disk, and clone 'bad' disks.
There's also a Diskpatch Professional, which licences you to provide commercial or non-commercial services. The license information is contained in the DiskPatch manual.
Physical device recovery
Power Data Recovery is a risk-free and READ ONLY data recovery utility that helps you in recovering your all-important data, if you have lost it, for example after accidental format, virus problems, software malfunction, file/directory deletion, or even sabotage!
This is an easy to use data recovery utility which examines an inaccessible hard drive for damage and corruption and recovers the data.
It supports the following file systems: FAT 12 / 16 / 32 (used by hard disks, disks, Smartmedia™, Compact Flash™, Memory Stick and other) and NTFS (used by hard drives).
Power Data Recovery is easy to use and just 4 steps are required to recover your lost data, with no prior technical knowledge needed. It has the ability to scan all volumes in a local machine and build a directory tree of all lost and deleted files. It can save data to any Windows drive possible (including network drives, removable media, etc). It supports NTFS compressed and encrypted files and Dynamic Volume: Simple Volume, Spanned Volume, Stripe Volume, Mirror Volume, Raid-5 Volume. It has the ability to resume the last recovery result.
Here's a screenshot of "Power Data Recovery" in use:
