Presentation by:	Richard Kellerman
Representing:	POWER QUEST

Written by Elaine Davidson Mr. Richard Kellerman flew from St. Petersburg Florida to be our speaker for the evening. He represented Power Quest and talked about Partition Magic and Drive Copy. It's not often that we have had a speaker of the caliber of Mr. Kellerman. He kept us all interested, informed and entertained for over 2 hours. Mr. Kellerman began by apologizing in advance for having to talk too much but there was no screen available for him to demonstrate the programs on. He asked how many people had partitioned a hard drive and how many liked doing it. He described FDisk, a basic non user friendly program for partitioning hard drives that has been around since the late 1980's. It takes a long time, usually a few days, when it is used the hard drive is erased in order to make partitions. Partition Magic is a non-destructive partitioning program that is easy to use and should take a lot less time. He gave us reasons to partition a hard drive. The first reason is the FAT (file allocation tables) file system. When invented an arbitrary number of 65,525 entries was picked as the number of files available for a hard drive. It was thought to be adequate, as hard drives were very small 10 Meg or less. That number still stands today. A cluster is the smallest unit of data storage. The cluster size is the hard drive size divided by 65,525. On a 1.2G hard drive a cluster is 32Kilobytes. Once a cluster is written to even if only 1 byte is used the hard drive counts it as used and unavailable for other information. On average a 1.2G hard drive with 32K clusters has 40% of its space thrown away. By breaking the hard drive down into smaller parts you can reduce the cluster size to 16K or 8K with wastage of less than 10%. It is easier to organize a hard drive if it is partitioned. A typical suggestion for organizing would be separate partitions for your applications, games, data files, etc. and a separate partition for the operating system, if you use more than one operating system you can have each system on a different partition hidden from the others. Mr. Kellerman then talked about the 3 types of partitions, primary for booting and loading operating systems, logical partitions for holding data and programs and extended partitions, a place holder that can hold multiple logical partitions. Any primary partition can see all the extended and logical partitions but only one primary can be active at a time. A hard disk can have up to 4 partitions 3 primary and one extended. If Fdisk will not partition a hard Drive then Partition Magic will not either. Partition magic works with utility programs such as Norton and compression programs such as Drive Space 3 and Stacker. It will support up to 9 physical drives. Bundled with partition magic are two applications to help you move programs and data around Magic Mover and Drive Mapper (new with this version). Hugh Crawford arrived with a monitor and after a break Mr. Kellerman gave a short demonstration of how the program worked, and a fast talks about Drive Copy a simple program with an elegant solution. It will copy one entire drive to another drive. Mr. Kellerman didn't ask for questions because the whole time that he had been speaking he had answered any questions that we had. It was one of the best demonstrations we have had, if you get the chance go listen and learn. I for one would go a long way to hear him speak again. Article first published in PC Monitor. PC Monitor is the official publication of the Durham Personal Computer Users' Club and is published monthly at Oshawa, Ontario. The DPCUC mailing address is P.0. Box 2463, Oshawa ON L1H 7V7. The PC Monitor cannot be responsible for errors or inaccuracies in the content, although efforts will be make to publish information accurately. The deadline for articles and information is one week following the monthly meeting. Late submissions may not be published due to tight scheduling. Please submit articles by E-mail to the newsletter editor.