MiniTool Partition Wizard Free Edition

MiniTool Partition Wizard Home Edition 8 adds disk conversion and copying to what was already one of our favorite disk partitioning tools, free or not. It creates, deletes, aligns, moves, resizes, recovers, splits, joins, hides, copies, and converts partitions or entire disks. It can change drive letters, label partitions and volumes, edit properties, and check file systems. It does all that and more for free, though premium upgrades for business environments, servers, and special needs are available.

PROS

Powerful and flexible: MiniTool Partition Wizard has the tools advanced users need to manage all their disk drives. We used the Split Partition tool’s slider to size and create an 80GB partition on an external hard drive in mere seconds.

Undo it: An Undo button lets you back off changes before they’re irrevocable.

Help: A fully indexed and illustrated Help file explains each feature and process clearly.

Wizards and extras: Both wizard-based and separate tools make MiniTool one of the most flexible partition managers we’ve tried at any price. It can wipe drives, create bootable CDs, change drive serial numbers, create dynamic disks, and export disk configurations, too.

CONS

Data killer: The only fault we’ve found with MiniTool Partition Wizard is common to all such tools: it can destroy data when used carelessly (always pay attention, take your time, and back up your data when formatting or partitioning disk drives).

BOTTOM LINE

MiniTool Partition Wizard Home Edition 8 does what pricey premium tools do, and more — yet it’s free. It remains our primary disk utility.