PowerQuest, best known as the makers of PartitionMagic, got bought out by the monolith Symantec–soon to be the only large maker of utility software in the universe–back in December.
This eliminates DriveImage as a competitor to Ghost, gives Symantec a killer consumer app in PartitionMagic, and also gives Symantec the enterprise-class PartitionMagic-like apps.PartitionMagic was a good product. I hope Symantec doesn’t dummy it down too much. But for the past year or so, I’ve been booting Knoppix and running qtparted whenever I need to resize partitions. Long ago I made a boot CD containing the DOS version of a semi-recent copy of PartitionMagic (whatever the last version I bought was), but qtparted handles filesystem types that PartitionMagic won’t touch, so the free alternative is more useful to me. Besides, it’s legal for me to use qtparted on any of my computers or anyone else’s. I don’t think PartitionMagic can be used on more than one PC without additional expense.
If the secret ever gets out about Knoppix and qtparted, PartitionMagic stands to lose a big chunk of its market.
David Farquhar is a computer security professional, entrepreneur, and author. He has written professionally about computers since 1991, so he was writing about retro computers when they were still new. He has been working in IT professionally since 1994 and has specialized in vulnerability management since 2013. He holds Security+ and CISSP certifications. Today he blogs five times a week, mostly about retro computers and retro gaming covering the time period from 1975 to 2000.
What’s next, a Symantec Linux release? Sheesh.
Norton Linux! (Shudder.)
…and Partition Magic may not be all that strong in the consumer market very much longer; Maxtor’s new software (included with consumer drives) is pretty darned workable: http://thetimesink.net/2004/DCB040105.html#Wednesday