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With hard drives growing to gigantic proportions, it makes sense to impose order by dividing a single monster disk into discrete partitions that your computer sees as separate drives. V Communications' Partition Commander 6.0 is the latest product to bring disk partitioning to the point-and-click masses, and it does an outstanding job.

Once a painful process even for gearheads, partitioning became exponentially easier when PowerQuest introduced its PartitionMagic product in 1995. Previously, the only way to create, or even resize, a partition was to blow away the entire hard drive using Microsoft's Fdisk utility and start from scratch. In 1998, V Communications joined the partitioning bandwagon with Partition Commander. Both products allow users to make changes on the fly, moving huge chunks of data around a hard drive without losing a scrap (in theory; you should always back up your data before undertaking such a major project).

In a game of numerical catch-up, Partition Commander jumps from version 1 to version 6.0 with its latest release. The new iteration adds the ability to resize NTFS (Windows NT) and Linux partitions. It can also convert NTFS and compressed NTFS into FAT and FAT32 (Windows 9x) partitions, something that PartitionMagic cannot do. It also adds a BackStep Wizard to undo operations, as well as a spiffed-up user interface. In my informal tests, the $40 Partition Commander worked just as well as its $70 rival from PowerQuest, but it offers a distinctly different user experience. (Partition Commander is also available as a download only for $30.)

While it is designed to walk a novice through the intricacies of hard-drive management, Partition Commander initially looks more like a tool for advanced disk jockeys because it runs outside of Windows in a low-resolution DOS mode. By contrast, rival PartitionMagic uses a flashy Windows interface with cartoon characters (reminiscent of work by the artist Keith Haring) to illustrate its operations.

Show Me the Way

Though not as pretty as the PowerQuest product, Partition Commander 6.0 is equally powerful, and easier to use. When you double-click its icon in Windows, Partition Commander launches a point-and-click DOS interface with a Partition Wizard that focuses on the end results you want, such as "More drive space" or "Faster disk access," rather than the technical means of achieving them. That approach should make more sense to those who aren't (and don't want to be) familiar with the behind-the-scenes details of disk partitioning.

For example, I began by clicking "Better organization" and was presented with three options: "Organize OS, applications, and data" by creating a separate partition for each, "Optimize disk space" by letting the program choose a more efficient file allocation system and cluster size, or "Duplicate a partition" in order to back up data. For each step, Partition Commander presented a context-sensitive Advisor button that, when clicked, explained in detail both what the action would do and why.

If you're an advanced user and don't require the wizard's hand-holding, you can select "Manual partitioning" and tweak to your heart's content.