In our tests, free online chat required about 15 minutes of wait time, free e-mail averaged about 72 hours for a response, and a live conversation over the phone required a $9.95 charge and a 30-minute wait. If you still can't find an answer, Symantec offers live technical-support options. And the online FAQ knowledge base, which works in both Internet Explorer and Firefox, contains only five answers. Gone is the 150-page printed manual that PowerQuest provided Symantec has made it a PDF file instead, which isn't useful if your hard drive's messed up. There is precious little additional information aside from the built-in help. The in-program help is pretty complete, but you'll want to consult the included PDF user manual as well.

If you install more than one operating system on your PC, BootMagic lets you select which operating system you want at start-up. Speaking of booting up, PartitionMagic 8 includes BootMagic, a simple utility that manages your PC's boot process. For example, if you hide a partition by accident, the rescue floppy disks allow you to boot up your machine and manipulate the drive's overall configuration. PartitionMagic also creates rescue floppy disks during installation (or anytime, using the option under the Tools menu) that allow you to run PartitionMagic and BootMagic as DOS utilities. To keep everything in order, PartitionMagic provides DriveMapper, a utility that searches for software references gone awry and adjusts the shortcuts to reflect your new partitions. By adding or deleting partitions, the PC's drive assignments tend to get jumbled up Not only that, but you might end up invalidating shortcuts and Registry entries that point to specific files and directories (for instance, you might store your digital photos on drive M).

New features added to PartitionMagic 8 after the Symantec purchase include the capability to create partitions up to 300GB conversion of FAT, FAT32, and NTFS drives without losing data and the capability to enlarge an NTFS partition without restarting your computer.Īll physical drives are associated with letters.

Powerquest partition magic 8.0