VCOM Partition Commander 9.0 review:5 stars (Flawless for me) - Last time I used Partition Commander was version 6. Yes, I had an issue where I lost a partition, but I became well aware of the program after that. Bought Version 9 (even after reading the reviews) because I bought a Dell laptop and for some reason Dell thinks I like a 80 GB drive all in one partition. Thinking I had nothing to lose since the laptop is so new, I bought Partition Commander 9 and installed it. I too chose NOT to use the 2 floppies, and install continued fine for me. I chose NOT to install or use System Commander because I didn't want to have that as a boot loader.
For the single purpose of breaking my one drive into 3, I rebooted the laptop and went to work in the familiar interface that I was used to in Version 6. After making the changes, exited out, rebooted and expected the worst due to the previous reviews here. XP booted with no issues and I now have 3 partitions.
This is one program that one needs to get to know first before doing anything. Just like any other partitioning program, one mistake can cost alot.
For me, I'm quite happy with my choice. It was $20 after rebates and it did just what I wanted it to do. 1 stars (Know what you are getting into before you start) - I picked up this program because I wanted to partition and format an external harddrive with FAT32 over 80GIG and XP Home would only partition a drive this size with NTFS. This looked like a good choice from reading the description on the box (next time I'll look over the reviews also). I briefly read the directions and figured I'll load it on my PC and work with the program later when I have time. I knew I was in trouble as soon as the CD started to load. It didn't ask where I wanted to load the folders or programs, it just started to load. When it came time to ask to make the 2 floppies I decided to abort the program and cancel. The program loaded anyway, and things were fine till I shutdown and went to restart the next day. I got a blank black screen. I could only boot from the CD. After much teeth gnashing I was able to get my system up and running with a backup I made earlier. Uninstalled and never will use again.
It says make a backup of everything and they are not lying. BEWARE 1 stars (Back up anything important before installing this.) - I canceled out of the setup "wizard" half-way through because I only had one floppy diskette on hand. (it wanted to make 2 boot floppies) It did not work properly, and no partition-editing operations were ever initiated. On reboot, I saw disk controller errors. scary. I try to bail... Uninstalling Partition Commander 9 did NOT revert my system to its original state.
On rebooting, I see the "NTLDR is missing" error message. (I use Win XP Pro) This was getting very serious. FIXBOOT and FIXMBR commands from WinXP recovery console ran without complaint but the NTLDR missing problem remained. I copied NTLDR and NTDETECT.COM from my winxp CD to the C: too. But the "NTLDR missing" problem remained. My WinXP system was unbootable, even though files on the disks were viewable through WinXP recovery console and through Knoppix.
My system is now sort of OK, though in a mess, after reinstalling Windows over the existing install. (did not reformat the drive)
---- WARNING ---- Because this type of software modifies bootsector and related mysterious things of a hard disk, it has the potential to [...] up your life. So please back up in preparation for the worst. Come to think of it, most of my experience with partition resizers have been unpleasant.
That said, this is just my personal experience with it. VCOM Partition Commander 9.0 Features: Computer software (programs) Utilities Back up (Backup Backing) Disk Drive Partitions (Hard) File Conversion (Convert) CD Recording (Burning, Burners)
VCOM Partition Commander 9.0 is the CD-ROM version. The full version can be purchased by clicking on the "CLICK HERE TO ORDER" button below for around 42.99USD.