PowerQuest Adds Win 2000, Linux Support

Upgraded drive management tools offer more options but still have limits.

Lincoln Spector, special to PC World

PowerQuest is offering new versions of Drive Image, DriveCopy, and its flagship program, PartitionMagic. Drive Image and DriveCopy can both make identical copies of your hard drive, and PartitionMagic lets you add, delete, and resize partitions without destroying the data on the hard drive. All three programs will support Windows 2000 and Linux file systems, as well as today's largest hard drives.

Both PartitionMagic and Drive Image will sell for $69.95, and DriveCopy will cost $29.95. All are scheduled to ship by the end of April.

PartitionMagic, which is upgraded to version 5.01, lets you create, format, resize, merge, convert between different file systems, change partition types, and delete the partitions on your drive--all on the fly. This helps you organize files, work with more than one operating system, or use the drive more efficiently. PartitionMagic includes a utility to move applications among partitions and update drive letter references.

Drive Image, which jumps from version 2.0 to 3.0, lets you back up a whole hard drive or individual partitions into a single, optionally compressed file that you can restore more quickly than other types of backups. The Drive Image backups are actually exact images of the drive, unlike the file-by-file backups done by conventional backup programs. For smaller, day-to-day backups, if you register your Drive Image 3.0 online, you can get a free download of DataKeeper, which does incremental data backups.

DriveCopy, which is also upgraded to version 3.0, does one simple thing: copy everything from one hard drive to another if you are upgrading your main hard drive (the one you boot from). Drive Image does this job and more, but DriveCopy costs considerably less.

Coping With Size

These programs add support for NT File System (NTFS) 5.0, which is new with Windows 2000 Professional, and the Linux Ext2 and SWAP file systems.

PartitionMagic 5.0 already partially supports NTFS. You can, for instance, create an NTFS partition, but you can't resize it. With 5.01 you can do both.

However, none of the programs offers a Windows 2000 Professional native executable. The operations involved must be executed at a level that Windows 2000 Professional doesn't provide, so you will have to use PowerQuest's boot floppy to work on NTFS 5.0 partitions. The floppy program's interface resembles Windows, but it's actually a DOS app. PowerQuest is working on versions that will run within Windows 2000 and hopes to have them out later this year, company representatives say.

Hard drives have been getting huge lately, and the updates are designed to keep up with them. According to PowerQuest representatives, the programs have been tested in-house on drives up to 30GB, and they assure us that they will work with any drive likely to be run on a desktop system, even the latest 75GB behemoths.

Rex Farrance contributed to this report.