Showing posts with label hard drive. Show all posts
Showing posts with label hard drive. Show all posts

8/26/2011

O&O PartitionManager 2 Professional Edition Review

OandO PartitionManager 2 Professional Edition
Average Reviews:

(More customer reviews)
If you are coming from Powerquest Partition Manager this does pretty much the same thing and it works. The interface is primitive, e.g., no drag and drop for resizing. I also cannot get it to resize the Visat OS partition, which I need to do to upgrade to Windows 7. There are better options, like Paragon.

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7/14/2011

Acronis Disk Director V11 Home Review

Acronis Disk Director V11 Home
Average Reviews:

(More customer reviews)
This product caused me a lot of problems yesterday. While I have never made a review like this before, I felt like I should offer this cautionary tale:
I bought this product after receiving several emails the upgrade from my previous version of DD 1o, which would no longer run on my laptop. Tried the trial version first and it looked like it would do what I wanted. My laptop was partitioned by DD 10 in 2 and I wanted to give the OS a little more space as I had used up the 37GB I had initially allocated that partition. And, it worked! Next I installed it on my 2 Desktops. On both of them it caused my computer to not boot up correctly until I selected "Start from last known good configuration." Next I tried to merge a small unallocated bit of HD space into the Partition of my older PC, which required a reboot.
Thant is when things started to go terribly wrong.
I got an error message during the reboot that process 2 failed.
And, the system failed to boot after that. Just a message about "Verifying DMI Pool Data."
So, I took the drive out and tried to use the included "Recovery Expert" module from DD 11 loaded on my other PC to restore the old partition.
But, the Recovery Expert module would not load. If I tried run it directly, and not from within DD I got a snapapi.dll not found error.
I went to the website, found how to chat with tech support, and was on with Ankur very quickly.
And, put immediately on hold. While I was clear about the situation, his advice to me was far less than helpful. ""Recovery Expert is for recovering deleted partitions." He said after several minutes. Yes, that is why I want to use it I explained. Kinda thought that was obvious. Several minutes later he came back with this; "You do not need to verify the product, it should work." YES, I KNOW IT SHOULD WORK, BUT IT DOESN'T. (No alt caps when I explained this to him.
So, I tried uninstalling, with the intent to reinstall. Got an error there too.
Next, I ran the installer again and choose repair.
That did it! I was able to use the Recovery Expert!
And, it looked like it worked.
But my joy was short lived, since when I put the drive back in my older PC, I still could not boot. After several hours of trying this, updating my Bios settings, etc I got nowhere.
Eventually I had to give up and wipe the drive. Now that rig is out of commission. :-(
Sad especially since I had a lot of expensive software on there. Fortunately I didn't have any critical files.
In conclusion:
The older Disk Director Suite was not very stable, at least by my own use, and a number of reviewers here on Amazon that gave it one star and called it dangerous.
This product may be better, hard to tell from my limited experience.
I found the free chat support fast but useless, I had multiple issues with instillation on my PCs, and the product itself performed a resizing of the partition on my laptop successfully, but and when I tried a simple merge of a small file it ended up ruining the OS and destroying all the data on the disk. Was it worth $30.00 to upgrade? After spending 9 hours trying to fix the OS on my PC that this program destroyed.... in a word. NO!
If you are going to use Disk Director 11 Home:
MAKE A BACKUP OF ANYTHING YOU VALUE & USE WITH EXTREME CATION.

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6/19/2011

Symantec Norton Ghost 15.0 (1 PC) Review

Symantec Norton Ghost 15.0 (1 PC)
Average Reviews:

(More customer reviews)
Backups get A+:
1. Backing up over network, high compression, custom drivers loading is easy to do. You will backup in style
2. Superior and useful utilities.
3. Every imaginable problem from the legendary Ghost 2003 is fixed and improved.
4. No more .gho format anymore. The current format so far has handled some large partition backups for me. Full 30GB partitions to high compression is a breeze.
Restores get C-:
1. Right away after a partition recover, you will get the message "Please insert the Recovery disk". It will say "Error EA730002: Cannot find the driver database directory". How does this error stay in the product? It is one confusing message for a successful recovery. The recovery disk is really just the ghost CD.
2. Then there is the staged recovery mystery. With 2 identical machines of the same hardware, I can only restore to the machine where I initially did the cold backups. I don't understand. This is ruining my confidence in the product. We are talking same motherboards, same versions, everything.
3. What other kind of hardware replacement will prevent my restores? Should I buy another backup product just in case?


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