A short time back I bought a small pocket hard drive – just a Western Digital 320GB USB version. The idea was to fill it with some music and movies and have it plugged into the Sony PS3. The idea was fine, I put the videos on the HDD and plugged it into the PS3 Slim but it didn’t see anything.
The problem I discovered was that the drive was formatted NTSF and I needed Fat32 that the Sony PS3 recognises. Windows 7 and Vista have basic HDD tools but I was not able to format the drive with out losing data.
So I searched for disk partition tools that can reformat and resize non destructively – that is, I can leave the data on it and not lose anything. Nortons version is probably the most known but has not been updated for ages and does not work above XP (don’t try it , it corrupts the disk in Vista, Win 7). To be honest I did not find many at all. I ended up finding a neat Free Partition Magic Alternative that works with Vista and Windows7 including 64bit versions. It is called Partition Wizard . And it is completely FREE!
Of course this is a program that hardly anyone ever really needs and if you do it is probably only once or twice. I installed, used it as I needed than uninstalled it. Being free is fantastic because I did not want to pay for something I would only use once. They do have a Bootable version that I could have used instead, I wonder how easy it would be to have a USB bootable version? If you need a Vista or Windows 7 version of Partition Magic then this is the one tool I recommend.
goldcoaster 
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