Portable Paragon Drive Copy 8.0 Pro

Paragon Drive Copy 8 Professional aims to help you out with this, as well as offering a backup tool. The interface is easy to use and information such as the contents of disks and partitions is displayed graphically with shading to show the amount of free space.

The One Button Copy wizard option is very fast – almost too fast as there is only a five second delay to review the options. Copying an 80GB disk to a 140GB model took just under 30 minutes and did not require a reboot. There are several useful options including the ability to skip certain system files without missing important information such as the boot sector, which is vital for dual booting systems.

Partition sizes can also be changed as part of the process. Bear in mind though that the disk you copy to must be empty, without any partitions on it. The scheduling options mean that Drive Copy 8 can also be used as a backup tool.
Operations can be scheduled as a one-off, when the computer starts or when the user logs on.

Some basic partition management can be performed with this software, although the Undelete tool is the only function not already offered by Windows. The bootable CD is a useful diagnostic tool, especially as it recognises Linux partitions as well as NTFS and Fat32.