Partition Wizard is a free piece of software from MiniTool which makes managing disks and disk partitions quick, easy, straightforward and safe. Creating, deleting, resizing, moving and merging of partitions can be handled with ease thanks to the well laid out and easy to navigate user interface.
The cloning of both individual partitions and disks is also made easy thanks to the specialised cloning tool. This allows for any cloned partitions and disk be automatically resized to accommodate a larger target disk and the image optimised for use on an SSD drive.
Many other more advanced features are also incorporated including the ability to convert between MBR and GPT partition tables and back again and the ability to convert basic disks to dynamic.
Finally, some other great features are included such as disk benchmark and space analyzer , file system and disk surface integrity checking tools and secure wiping tools to permanently erase an entire partition or disk.
A well specified tool so far, lets see what it can do!
Features
Well designed and easy to use software
Impressive set of features for a free version
Basic partitioning tools (create, delete, resize, move etc.)
Advanced partitioning tools ( wipe, copy, merge etc.)
Ability to format partitions and convert between MBR and GPT
Disk copying and migration tools (supports hard drive to SSD)
Partition scanning and recovery tool included
Disk surface and file system integrity checking tools
Cant convert dynamic disks to basic nor create partitions on dynamic disks (Pro only)
100% free to use
Installing
Downloading partition wizard from the MiniTool website is easy to do, they do try and up sell the Pro version, which is fine, but once the download link is online, which is very quick to download and start running.
Once installed MiniTool takes us straight to the partition wizard home screen, from here all of the currently attached disks can be seen and all major operations within the application initiated.
Basic Features of Partitioning Tasks
I really like the design of Partition Wizard, from the main home screen all operations can be performed on any of the available disks and to start a basic partitioning task is as simple as right clicking on a target disk and then selecting the operation.
As with a lot of partition managers the operation will not begin the second that these aforementioned details are entered, instead one or more operations can be queued up and then everything which is pending will be executed when pressing the apply button (as shown below):
Cloning Disks and Partitions
One of the most popular uses of partition manage tool is to accommodate the adding of new, often larger and faster disks to existing PC systems. This is especially popular in recent years due to the ongoing popularity and ever decreasing cost of super fast SSD drives!
The cloning tool allows for a full disk or an individual partition to be cloned to another disk, this can optionally include resizing the partition to accommodate a different sized target disk and also optimising for SSDs.
It needs to be noted, however, that making full system migrations (i.e. all data partitions and the bootable partition) is reserved for the Professional version of Partition Wizard
Surface Test
In addition to the partition management and disk cloning tools Partition Wizard contains various other system maintenance tools to help keep PCs running at their best. The Surface Test and Check File System tools both check the integrity of the physical disk and the formatted file system respectively.
MiniTool Partition Wizard Free vs Professional
The free version of MiniTool Partition Wizard contains a good set of tools to help manage hard drives and migrate data whilst in the process of introducing new drives into the system. As with most free software MiniTool also produce a Professional version and naturally there are some additional features in this Pro version which are missing from the free version.
MiniTool partition wizard is available for a one-off fee of $59 and $129 which comes with free lifetime upgrades, you can find out more by clicking here.
Summary
With Partition Wizard MiniTool have produced a solid disk and partition management tool allowing the majority of day-to-day cloning and maintenance tasks to be completed with ease.
I particularly like that the software looks great, is well designed and as such makes finding the right tools within the application easy. I also appreciate that the software worked very well during my testing and would be happy to recommend it to anyone looking to migrate to new disks and maintain existing partitions in the course of running a Windows PC.
It is also nice to see MiniTool Solutions offering a Professional version with upgrades at a very fair price of just $59! The free tool is very good but if the small set of limitations does cause any issues I would definitely recommend considering the Professional version.
All-in-all a great effort which works well and looks good, well done MiniTool!
