Some time ago I got curious about the Windows Server 2008 R2 Beta MS recently put out for grabs. So I downloaded the release and fired up my trusty xVM VirtualBox, only to find out that R2 will only install on 64-bit machines. My PC does, in fact, have a 64-bit heart (Athlon 64 X2 6000+ Brisbane), but the host OS on which vXM runs is a 32-bit Windows XP SP3 install. To make a long story short, I had to drop the virtual machine idea and install R2 natively. Fortunately, I had a nearly empty partition to spare, which R2 happily took for its own.

After a few days of testing, I decided to keep the R2 install as a testbed for server software. However, I felt the partition it was installed onto was too large and I wanted to recover some of that space. Problem was, I needed a partition manager that would run on a server version of Windows (I preferred to avoid resizing the partition from within XP, just in case), so I postponed the whole thing for a while. Not for long though, since after a couple of days I got an email from the guys over at EASEUS, asking if I wanted to test their server partition manager

The program is able to perform a lot of partition and hard disk related tasks:

• - creating partitions using unallocated space
• - format partitions (FAT32 or NTFS)
• - copy entire partitions (requires unallocated space of at least equal size)
• - resize partitions (requires a reboot if the target partition is the one on which the currently running OS resides)
• - move partitions (if you need to “move around” some of the unallocated space, maybe to grow another partition)
• - delete partition

It’s also possible to copy an entire hard disk, provided you have an empty one prepared.

Most of the operations are assisted by the graphical representation of disks and partitions, very similar to what most people are used from PowerQuest’s legendary Partition Magic (acquired and then closed down by Symantec in 2004). Simply, click, right click, drag, drop, resize on the disks and partitions to perform all available operations and run the various included tools.

Some of these tasks can also be performed by accessing the Disk Manager snap-in (Right click on My Computer -> Manage -> Disk Manager): Changing partition labels, changing partition letters. Still, it’s handy to have them available in a partition manager, since they are most often used when one is working with disks and partitions.

There’s a “check” tool which will analyze a partition for inconsistencies and is also able to execute the Chkdsk program to fix errors. It will also scan for bad sectors, if instructed. However, in case there are open files on the target partition, it will automatically start Chkdsk in read-only mode.

“Hide partition” and “set active” are somewhat rarely used options, but they should, nevertheless, be present in any partition manager.

A very useful feature (which should be standard for all partition managers) is the ability to create a bootable disc from which the program can be started even if the OS fails to boot. It works with both CDs and DVDs. When ran in this way, the partition manager correctly detects most RAID volumes thanks to the integrated drivers. (This is very important, since running via a boot disk means that drivers that would otherwise be installed on the OS are now unavailable).

Unfortunately, EASEUS Partition Manager, cannot handle dynamic disks (Microsoft’s LVM/Software RAID implementation). To say the truth, not many partition managers are able to do this and I only know of one that does it on a server version of Windows (Paragon’s Partition Manager, which is sensibly more expensive)

The supported features, however, performed perfectly in my case (a 21GB partition was moved in under 30 minutes). I didn’t encounter any errors or “hiccups” during the program’s runtime. Many tasks can be performed without restarting the computer and are effective immediately (after moving the aforementioned partition, system information was updated automatically and I was able to create a new partition in the unallocated space).

On the downside, I have to mention the fact that some parts of the GUI don’t use system fonts, with strange results.

Another thing I noticed is that after the partition manager does its job and restarts the computer the second time, Windows will warn you that it was unable to boot properly in the previous attempt. Of course, that’s only because the partition manager restarted the computer before the boot process could be completed. I can’t call this a bug or lack of functionality, but a workardound could probably be implemented, to avoid any possible confusion.

Some may also point out the 1.5TB size limitation, but I think it’s just because the software doesn’t support dynamic disks and at the moment there have been a few announcements about HDDs larger than 1.5TB, but no actual products are available for purchase

If you want to know more, you can check the complete features list on the EASEUS website.