Parted Magic LiveCD. In order to partition a hard drive, generally, the system reinstallation is. License: Free OS: Linux Dos Windows XP Windows Vista Windows 2000 Windows 7 Windows 8 Mac OS X.
With this tool, you can move partitions, resize partitions (even the active one), copy partitions, as well as change the drive letter and label, check the partition for errors, delete and format partitions (even with a custom cluster size), convert NTFS to FAT32, hide partitions, and wipe all that data off of partitions.
Partition Mac Drive
It is the most powerful Mac volume manager that enables you to perform any partitioning operations like resizing, deleting, formatting, hiding/revealing a partition — except merging. As a Mac partition manager, it is a useful app that sits within your Utilities folder, inside your Applications folder. Before starting a Mac partition exercise, it’s worth fully backing-up the folder you want to copy using Carbon Copy Cloner.
There are many ways to clone a drive on Mac OS X, but none quite as simple and effective as Carbon Copy Cloner. It's our top pick for disk cloning utilities because it gets the job done any which way you need.
Carbon Copy Cloner
Platform: Mac OS X Price:Free $40 Download Page
Features
Create an exact clone of any disk
Create a bootable backup of your Mac OS X boot drive
Easily migrate files from one disk to another
Supports block-level disk-to-disk clones (this basically means it copies everything faster, as file-to-file copy can take a bit longer)
After the first backup, you can sync changes to quickly update your backups
Archive old and deleted versions of files
Back up to a hard drive, network share, or disk image
Schedule backup tasks hourly, daily, weekly, or monthly
Configure backups to occur when you plug in the backup drive
Back up to another Mac on your network or somewhere else on the internet
Super-simple interface makes it easy to use
'Cloning coach' helps new users learn to make the right choices when cloning a drive
Disk image backups can be encrypted
Backups are compatible with Apple's Migration Assistant, so you can use a cloned drive to migrate to a new Mac
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Where It Excels
Carbon Copy Cloner (CCC) is great because it's easy to configure, it gets the job done quickly, and you can pretty much set it and forget it. Cloning a disk can be as simple as selected a source disk and destination—whether that destination is another hard drive, a disk image, or a network share. From there you just click the 'Clone' button and CCC does all the work. If you don't want to backup an entire drive, however, CCC can handle incremental and partial backups as well. It can also sync files between two drives, and you can choose to archive old or deleted files or just keep the backups completely identical. If you want your disk cloning and backups to be almost completely hands-free, you can schedule backups or tell CCC to start the backup process when a specific disk is connected to your machine. Basically, whatever you need it to do it can handle and it will get the job done fast and easy.
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Where It Falls Short
CCC really has no downsides. Unless you like the crazy interface and restore features of Time Machine, or prefer something with a more simplified online backup option (like Crashplan or one of these syncing file services), maybe you'll want to try something else. But CCC can backup to drives anywhere on else on the internet and you can use backups to restore old versions of files—just not as elegantly as you might with other software. Everything it does it does well, so there's little to complain about.
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The main issue we now have with Carbon Copy Cloner is its price. It went from free to $40, which is kind of a big jump. It's still our favorite app, but we'd like to see it somewhere around half the price. As much as we love it, it just doesn't do enough to justify $40. The upside, however, is you can still download the older version for free. While it isn't supported in Mountain Lion, it appears to be working fine. This may not be the case forever, but for now it it isn't a problem. If that ever changes, we hope the price drops to something a bit more reasonable because we'd love to support the software.
The Competition
Super Duper is probably the most obvious alternative to CCC, but it'll cost your $28 if you want to unlock all its features. It is a capable drive cloner free of charge, but to get features like scheduling, scripting, smart updates, and more, you'll need to pay the fee. We feel this alone makes CCC a clearly better choice, but some prefer Super Duper and you may, too.
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ChronoSync will run you $40 and give you a very comprehensive feature set. While it's certainly capable of cloning and syncing drives, it's definitely a full-on backup utility that can handle things like complex file comparisons, data filters, and pretty much anything you could need. If you need a backup and cloning app that can do practically everything, ChronoSync should do the trick.
Disk Utility, which is built in to Mac OS X (just see your Hard Drive -> Applications -> Utilities folder), is technically capable of cloning a drive. While it copies file-by-file, rather than block-by-block, it can generally get the job done so long as you're not trying to clone the disk you booted from. While we'd highly recommend using CCC instead, seeing as it's also free, if you're in a pinch and can't download another app this is an option that will always be available. So is the dd command, which is a better choice if you're comfortable messing around in the OS X command line.
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Got any other disk cloning apps you love? Share 'em in the comments!
Disk Partition Software Mac Free
Lifehacker's App Directory is a new and growing directory of recommendations for the best applications and tools in a number of given categories.
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Most of us probably have rather large hard disks or SSDs at our disposal. If you like to work with multiple operating systems or need a better way to segregate the storage of data, like separate partitions for media files and apps for instance, it's important to use a tool that can perform the task of slicing up a disk easily and safely. Although all Windows versions since Vista come with a basic, built-in partition manager, it still might be too simple or limiting for some tasks. For today's Five Apps blog entry, we will be looking at five excellent freeware partition editors that should serve as effective replacements for Microsoft's implementation.
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Five Apps
1. EaseUS Partition Master Home Edition
This product not only has the distinction of being a user-friendly partition manager for Windows, but EaseUS throws in a few handy extras, such as basic file recovery as well as backup and restore abilities. There are also tutorials to help guide a user along with the proper instructions on what you need to do for effective partitioning. The user interface is clean and there aren't any nagging popups, begging you to upgrade to a paid version.
2. Active@ Partition Manager
Active@'s solution is decidedly Spartan looking. Despite this fact, it covers all the necessary bases well for partition management operations. If you are a power user, you can even edit partition tables directly at the HEX level, if you are brave enough of course. The only problem with this software is the lack of Windows 8 support, so just be aware of that.
3. Paragon Partition Manager 12 Free
Paragon Software, a premier vendor for high-quality administration tools, has a free version of its powerful partition management solution. What makes this tool stand out from most is the easy to use 'express' wizard, which makes partitioning on disks a relative snap. The standard interface on the other hand is a bit lacking in features. But for a free product, it's to be expected.
Partition Software For Mac Free
4. MiniTool Partition Wizard
From a company I only heard about recently, MiniTool's partition application is feature packed and powerful enough for home users. It even supports cutting-edge features, like UEFI boot, 4K advanced format drives and clean partition merging. There is even a feature for creating a bootable flash drive for offline system disk slicing. This product is definitely worth checking out.
5. GParted
Despite being a Linux-based application, GParted can work easily with Windows NTFS partitions, allowing for resize and move operations with no>