Easeus Partition Master Professional Edition was already a very competent partitioning program. Not everyone needs anything beyond the basic facilities provided with Windows Vista or Windows 7, but when you do EPM Pro has always been a good place to start shopping, along with Acronis Disk Director, and some freebies like Parted Magic. The latest version adds partition recovery capabilities to an already bulging feature set.
Partition Master Professional has earned my respect over the last few years. I’ve created, deleted, formatted, moved, and resized partitions with both real and virtual hard drives with a 100% success rate. That’s excepting a short period of time when the program didn’t recognize some VM hard drives. Operations are cached until you click the Apply button, so you may construct complex partitioning chores in relative safety. Even so, back up your hard drive before you edit your partition structure.
Alas, the partition recovery, while it works, it might sometimes fool users into thinking it doesn’t. For instance, I deleted a partition then created two new ones in the resulting void (without writing any data). Partition Master Professional failed to find the deleted original partition beneath the two new ones. When I deleted the two new partitions, however, the program found all three deleted partitions. Upon restoring the original partition, all its data was intact so I’ll call the operation an overall success and leave you with the caveat. Easeus explained that this was a “feature” designed to prevent users from overwriting new partitions. I call it misguided.
Easeus Partition Master Professional Edition includes a fully functional ISO image that you can burn to CD and boot from. It’s virtually identical to the Windows-based application.
For users with less stringent requirements, there’s a free Home version of Partition Master, and to work on server operating systems you’ll need the pricier Server version. All told, Partition Master Professional is a handy program for anyone to have within reach.