The sharpest tool in the drawer...

I had a frustrating time last night. Mrs. Rex's dad had his main drive partitioned up into a 4GB C: drive and a 26GB D: drive and was having problems with C: filling up.

I'd recently gotten a new SimpleTech 1GB USB Flash Drive and had loaded it up with all the tools of my trade. The software and applications I most frequently use. This was to make me a mobile computer repair commando with everything I needed at my disposal dangling from my keychain.

I typically carry around a little 2.5" USB hard drive enclosure with a 40GB IDE notebook drive in it for this task but was making an attempt at reducing the size and weight of my portable.

Well, over the course of three days that I've been trying to use the flash drive it's been nothing but problems. I spent a goodly amount of time reformatting it, creating a "Flash Backup" folder on my desktop so when the thing cheesed out and gave me a "file is corrupt or unaccessible" error I could just wipe it and reload it in a jiffy. What a pain in the ass. The flash drive now lives in my trash can until Wednesday when the garbage man comes.

I took it over to my in-laws with the intention of installing partition magic from the flash drive and resizing his partitions. When it cheesed out and wouldn't let me. Piece of shit. I'm going back to the 2.5" USB enclosure. So, instead of driving home and getting the old standby drive I took a stab at finding a nice Open Source Alternative.

I cruised over to osalt.com and looked up alternatives to partition magic. It looked like the tool for the job was a utility called gparted - they had a live CD version so I downloaded it and burnt it to CD. Booted to it and took a look.

I really like the smooth, clean operations of live CD's in general. It's a great way to move around applications and make them portable and compatible. It loaded right up and I started in trying to figure out how to resize the partitions. It was simple to figure out how to use the app, it's real similar to partition magic. Only it wouldn't let me queue up expanding the 4GB C: partition. I could resize D: to 15GB but not expand C: to fill the space left.

I verified it was an NTFS partition, sure enough. Weird. So, I figured It probably just wouldn't let me do it until after the space was available. I kicked off the D: part resize and waited...and waited...and waited. It ran through some file and directory verification okay then started a 20 minute resize operation. 20 Minutes??? What the hell? Partition magic would do it in like 30 seconds...oh well.

20 Minutes later it kicked off ANOTHER 20 minute task. The same task, again. What? Was the first one practice? At this point I called in the calvary. Typically I'd have to take care of it my self but since I was working on her Dad's computer Mrs. Rex agreed to pitch in.

I called her up and walked her through burning partition magic from my PC to a CD and she brought it over...before gparted had completed the resize.

Just for giggles I then asked gparted to try and resize C: again. It wouldn't. Even with the space available on the disk it refused to resize the primary boot partition, even though it was NTFS.

I restarted the PC, win2k came up and ran a scandisk on the new newly modified partition and windows came up normally. Disk manager showed the new D: size and the big empty space I'd created. Everything looked fine. I loaded the PM cd and installed it, fired it up.

PM was now reporting the drive was "BAD" - what the hell? I scheduled another scandisk and restarted. No errors. PM still shows the disk as bad. Fired up the Partition Info tool from PM - it's complaining about geometry errors on the disk. Basically saying the new D: partition was not configured correctly.

Luckily PM has a little command line switch /ipe which tells it to ignore errors.

PM quickly and easily resized C:, Fixed D: and got us rolling in about 2 minutes.

So, the flash drive went in the trash and the gparted CD went in the microwave.

Oh, and by the way. A quick note about Partition Magic. Symantec bought it a while back and I'm not as fond of the newer versions. If you're looking for the best partition manager out there see if you can't find yourself a copy of PowerQuest's Partition Magic 8.0.

It's been going on for over a decade and I'm still pissed at Symantec over what they did to Norton Utilities, Ghost and now PM. Why do they feel so compelled to buy great, efficient well designed utility applications and turn them into bloated crapware?

Oh well...

The hammer hanging in my garage is older than I am, it's not as swanky as a new fiber-glass handled techno hammer, but it gets the job done.

I'm still looking for a good flash drive, something that will be more reliable. I guess that shows me for buying the cheapest one I could find on froogle. But for the time being the 2.5" USB enclosure with an IDE drive and a three year old version of partition magic on it still gets the job done faster and more reliably so it's what I'll continue to reach for...the sharpest knife in the drawer.