PartitionMagic is a utility for hard disk drive partitioning originally made by the Power Quest Corporation but now owned by Symantec in 2003. The software runs on Microsoft operating systems, including Windows XP, 2000, NT, Me, and 98. It's incompatible with Windows Vista and later versions. A bootable disk for partitioning drives must be used instead. It is capable of resizing, creating different drives (partitions), and other modifications to hard disk drives without losing any information on the hard disk drive.
Powerquest partition table editor 1.0 download
The DOS versions of PartitionInfo and PTedit (along with FDisk andFormat) have been compiled into some bootable floppy and CD image files. On booting to them, they should immediately load the output of PartitionInfo into a text file on aRAMdrive as X:\partinfo.txt. This output can be simply read or be copied/savedto a floppy drive or to an available FAT partition. There is no USB supportunless your BIOS supports it directly. The A: drive on the CD is notwritable but if the system also has a physical floppy drive it should be accessible as drive B: once you have booted to the CD. When ready you can close the initial display of text (in edit.com) from its File Menu and then from the A:\ prompt you should be able to run ptedit, fdisk, format or partinfo at your will.
There are times when it can beextremely helpful to be able to read, understand, pass on and even editinformation relating to one's hard drives, their partitions and otherdata that they contain. It is often necessary to do this from outsidethe hard drive in question and typically from another operating systemaltogether. With the right tools at one's disposal, it is oftenpossible to regain access to an unbootable system or to access/recoverapparently deleted data.
The use of a disk hex editor on a boot CD is another approach and wehave covered this in some detail on our TinyHexer and BartPE page. A superb andmore elaborate program for looking into these murky waters is theshareware WinHex- butthis has to be run from a Windows interface. The program TestDiskcan also dig out certain basic information and is good at recovering"lost" partitions but is not user-friendly for newbies. The TBU programBiNG, covered on another ofour own pages, can also search unallocated space for lostpartitions and facilitate the rebuilding of partition tables. The twomain PowerQuest utilities and some other utilities are described ingreater detail below.
If you haven't used one of the utilities mentioned in the Quick Start to make a bootable medium, you can still download and unzip the stand-alones PartIn9x.zip(for Win9X/ME) or PartInNT.zip(for Win2K/XP and "Vista-ish") as well as partinfo.zip(the DOS version which only gives a text output). The Windows GUI has more or less run OK from Vista. We did experience some problems displaying all the information in its Windows but it did correctly display the correct text output whenpreviewed or saved as a file.
Two basic sorts of information may be displayed, copied, printed,etc. Firstly there is the sort of information shown in Fig 1, which isfairly straightforward and is a translation of the information in thepartition tables found in the MBR and in each Logical Partition's EPBRscattered throughout the disk. Secondly there is the informationrelating to any specific partition's boot sector. If specificpartitions are highlighted in the upper window then clicking on the[Boot Record] button will open a secondary display outlining therelevant translated metadata contained in its PBS as shown in Fig 2.for the C: drive highlighted in Fig 1. Thevarious FAT and NTFS partitions will show on slightly differenttemplates from one another.
Specific areas of hard drives have different uses and one such area is known as a partition. Partitions come in different formats but also need to be capable of having their boundaries defined. These definitions are stored in what are called Partition Tables. A normal MBR (or EPBR) contains four such tables with each having 16 bytes of information written within the 512 (0-511) bytes of itshexadecimal offsets 1BE-1CD, 1CE-1DD, 1DE-1ED and1EE-1FD (or in decimal 456-461, 462-477, 478-493, and 494-509)respectively. If we examine just the first one with ahex editor it could have the following appearance:
It is possible to show exactly how these translate into values thataremeaningful to us humans (TheStarmanand others on the web will show youhow this is done if you really want to find out but it involvesreversing some sequences and using only parts of some of the bytes).The four-byte "d-word" for the number of sectors in the first partition is obtained by first reversing its sequence of bytes on disk from "CF FA 00 00" to the hexadecimal number "00 00 FA CF". The leading zeros are dropped and one can then quite easily convert the hexadecimal number FACF to the decimal one of 64197, using a calculator. The translated output of this whole example is shown in Partition Table 1 in Fig 5. Itactually references a non-active 31MB FAT16 partition at the start of ahard drive. PTEdit (Fig 4) has the same values but with the columns ina slightly different order. Fig 5 shows the entries in the samesequence that they are written in the partition tables. Excepting whenlegacy geometry is needed on old systems, the CHS values becomevirtually meaningless once the 8.4 gig threshold is traversed and whenallCHS values then begin with "1023 Cylinders".
"HiddenSectors" is a synonym for "SectorsBefore". These are sectors that span a defined area prior to anypartition's actual PBS. Primary partitionsdefine it from the start of the hard drive. A logical partition's firstpartition table defines it from its own EPBR and its second partitiontable (when there is one) is a reference from the start of thecontaining extended partition to where the next logical partition'sEPBR will be found. Confusing? Indeed it can be!
The first of three logical partitions within the extendedpartition (referenced by Partition Table 3 in Fig 5) is shown in Fig 6. The firstpartition table references its own PBS and the second one referencesthe next EPBR in the daisy chain. The next EPBR is displayed in Fig 7.
The last of these three logical partitions is shown in Fig 8 and so onlyreferences its own PBS. Each EPBR's partition tables are in the sameposition as those in a standard MBR and have the same generalstructure. The rest of the EPBR does not normally, unlike the MBR,contain any bootstrap code.
1) boot into Acronis bootable media, start Acronis True Image 2016 and select Tools tab, locate Add new disk option and click on it. Select your RAID 0, select MBR or GPT layout depending on what you had in the backup, skip the step with creating partitions and proceed. This will completely clear your RAID
To resize partition, especially extend a partition, on Windows Server more conveniently, you can free download the AOMEI Partition Assistant Lite Edition. It supports Windows Server 2000, 2003, 2008, 2012, 2016, 2019, 2022, Windows SBS 2003, 2008, 2011 and Windows Hone Server 2011.
If you want to extend the Server partition with it, you can try Allocate Free Space features, which can allocate free space from one partition to another directly. Please download the Server Demo for a free trial.
Did you see? If you are looking for a partition magic for Windows Server, AOMEI Partition Assistant must be the correct answer. To unlimited use it within one company, you can turn to AOMEI Partition Assistant Unlimited, its "Create Portable Version" enables users to create AOMEI Partition Assistant to a removable device so that users can directly run it on target computers without installation.
I've always been curious about how disks are partitioned, and how the partition table looks like. This article will explain the format of the partition table and will provide a small tool (Partition Viewer) to demonstrate what we explained.
The number of sectors before (at offset 8) designate where the partition data begins starting from the partition table definition. If in the MBR, an entry has sectors_before equal 63, then this means that the boot sector of that partition is located at sector 63.
Extended partitions unlike primary partitions, have IDs 5 or 15 and cannot have a file system associated with them, instead they point to another partition table that has at most two partition table entries. The second one can be an extended partition, thus nesting more partitions inside of it). Extended partitions can be considered as just containers of other partitions. We will demonstrate partition table nesting next.
Because of the structure of the partition table located in the MBR, we realize that we can have at most 4 partition table entries in each partition table. To overcome this limitation, special partition table entries are introduced that allow us to have an unlimited number of partitions that are linked together.
Inside the MBR, the extended partition entry describes the size of all the partitions that will be contained inside of it (using the nb_of_sectors field), whereas the NbSectorsBefore or CHS_START will be used to compute the link to the next partition table which can contain at most 2 partition table entries.
Notice that entry #2 is an extended partition (sysid = 15) of size: (26748225 * 512) = 13695091200 bytes = 13060 GB.This partition starts at sector 2666790 (sectors_before), let us go there and see the partition table pointed by it:
As we said, now every partition table that is pointed from the initial extended partition table entry has at most two entries. The first entry is a normal entry and the second entry (type = extended) is a link to another partition table. To compute the LBA of the second entry, we add to the sectors before the "sectors before" value from the extended partition table entry of the MBR, that is: 2666790+289170 = sector 2955960.
Partition Magic allows you to create, resize and merge partitions on your hard drive without destroying data. Partition Magic helps organize and protect your data, run multiple operating systems, convert file system types and fix partition table errors.Features: Organize and protect the information on a hard drive Easy, step-by-step 2ff7e9595c
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