EaseUS Partition Master is an all-in-one partition solution and disk management freeware. Three main features: Partition Manager, Partition Recovery Wizard and Disk & Partition Copy to solve all partition problems under hardware RAID, MBR & GPT disks, removable devices. The program allows you to drag and drop on the disk map to simplify your job. It doesn’t require a reboot when extending NTFS partition to minimize computer downtime.

It’s a rare user who’ll need more in the way of partitioning abilities than those provided by Windows. However, if that applies to you, then Easeus Partition Master Professional Edition is one of the programs you should consider. As of the current version 9.1, it’s as good as anything out there in nearly every aspect.

I’ve used Partition Master Professional many times to create, delete, format, move, rename, and resize partitions. Since my last look at version 6.6, the program has added the ability to work with dynamic disks (the software RAID solution within Windows) as well as merge contiguous partitions. All functions are selected and handily listed in a pane to the left of the main window so you can see what will transpire when you hit the Apply button. If you’ve ever forgotten to back out of moving a partition or other time-consuming operation with a program that doesn’t list pending actions, you can really appreciate this thoughtful feature.

This latest version of Partition Master Professional also has a wizard to step you through transferring your existing system to a larger hard drive. It’s basically a batch job for the existing Clone Disk function, but it saves you several steps and a lot of thought.

Partition Master Professional offers a Partition Recovery Wizard, but in my testing it didn’t find all the partitions in all their incarnations. For instance, I created two 10GB partitions, then merged them into one 20GB. The recovery wizard found both, but would let me restore only the first at its merged 20GB size, not in its original 10GB. Partition recovery is a nice feature, but it’s not as effective as some dedicated recovery applications such as Active Partition Recovery.

Easeus Partition Master Professional Edition includes a fully functional WinPE ISO boot disc image, but for some reason charges $20 for the Linux-based disc. For users with less stringent requirements, there’s a free home version of Partition Master. There is also a server version for use with Microsoft’s server operating systems. My only minor complaint about the program is that it doesn’t support the Mac HFS or HFS+ partition types that I occasionally must deal with.

This is a really good partitioning tool. The program is just like the good old Norton Partition Magic. Well, the interface is not that good, as it is in an old style. But everything else is like Partition Magic.

The program supports many file systems, including those of Linux. We can perform almost all kinds of tasks, like creating new partitions, resizing a partition, copying an entire disk or partition, etc. We can also hide a particular partition from Windows. Resizing and creating partitions is easy, but the tool lacks some features. It cannot split a partition that contains data. This is a serious disadvantage.

Another problem is that it doesn’t support GPT Disks. It can only read MBR disks. Well, there are not many programs that can do partitioning on GPT Disks. Only the “disk management” in Windows Vista and 64-bit versions of Windows can edit them.