Vista... Killer of Your Current Disk Utilities?
I’ve been trying out Microsoft Windows Vista Beta 2 (like many IT people who’ve joined the free beta), and found a couple of interesting things about it’s partition management and it’s effect on some of the disk utilities I’ve trusted to help me with Windows XP problems in the past.
I initially installed Vista on my test box, which went well (apart from D-Link telling me “We have no information on when drivers for Windows Vista will be made available for any D-Link product.” - nice to know you’re on the ball guys). I then thought about trying to install OpenSuSE 10.1 on the same machine so I can get a feel for the two running on the same hardware, and thats where the fun starts.
Vista was installed on one big partition covering the whole disk, so my initial though was to use Ghost 2003 to make an image of the partition before making any changes. I know Ghost 2003 is a few years old, but I have a bootable CD so I can recover the parition without needing to install the OS, which for me counts for a lot, as I’ve previously used this technique to recover from Windows XP problems on the same machine.
The result…. Ghost 2003 reports an error when I try to create an image from the disk…. not a good start.
My next thought was to use Partition Magic 8.0 to create a new partition and put OpenSuSE 10.1 into the new partition…. Still no joy. Partition Magic 8.0 reports errors with the partition (initially an error with the size, then instead of a parition table I get Error #105).
So at the end of the day I’ve gained at least one piece of useful information from testing Microsoft Windows Vista Beta 2, it’s that if I’ll probably have to spend as much money (if not more) upgrading my utilities as I will spend on OS upgrades (or spend months testing all of the open source disk utilities for utilities with similar functionality, a decent user interface, and a helpdesk for when problems occur).
Alternatively I could start testing Wine on OpenSuSE 10.1…..