PowerQuest PartitionMagic

» see symantec.com/partitionmagic as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

i used partitionmagic around the university years, on a ttnet broadband box with one hard drive that needed to fit both windows xp and a linux i was trying to learn. it was the program you booted from a floppy or a cd and trusted with the live filesystem. half-an-hour of progress bar, a forced restart, then a fresh partition where there had not been one before. if it worked you got dual-boot. if it did not, you went looking for an install cd.

powerquest started shipping it from utah in 1994. version 2.0 was for sale by january 1995, and an os/2 build followed that september. for a few years it was the only commercial tool that could resize ntfs, fat16 and fat32 without making you copy your files off first. that was a real piece of magic in the era of one 40gb disk per pc.

symantec paid roughly 150 million dollars for powerquest in september 2003 and announced fairly quickly that there were no plans for a new version. version 8.05 in may 2004 was the last build that ever shipped. windows vista showed up in 2007 and partitionmagic could not handle it. by december 2009 symantec posted the official end-of-availability. the website later replaced the product page with a single line: sorry, we no longer offer norton partition magic.

~ the case file ~

~ the climb ~

before partitionmagic, the standard way to repartition a disk was fdisk plus a full backup plus a full restore. the program took the patented hot-resize work powerquest had built and turned it into a floppy you could buy in a shrinkwrapped box. for a power user in 1998 to 2004 it was a normal utility-shelf purchase next to norton utilities and nero burning rom.

~ the slide ~

symantec acquired powerquest mostly for the imaging tools that became norton ghost. partitionmagic came along as part of the deal and got the same neglect treatment that winfax got. no vista build, no windows 7 build, no answer to changing filesystems. by 2007 the free linux livecd gparted could do most of the same work, and any windows admin who needed a paid commercial product had already moved on to acronis or easeus.

~ the inheritance ~

the descendants are everywhere. windows xp service pack 1 added a basic disk management console. windows 7 onward let you shrink and extend ntfs volumes from the gui without any third-party software. gparted handles every filesystem you might still meet on a desktop, free, from a usb stick. the category partitionmagic invented is now a checkbox on the operating system itself, which is the cleanest possible death for a commercial utility.

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