But as this is all a bit non-standard (to be polite), youre not getting any support anyway.When the folks at Aomei contacted me about reviewing their Partition Assistant partition manager once again, I was less than enthusiastic.
It was, and remains, a fine utility, but its a rare user that requires anything more than the old version or Windows own Disk Manager and Diskpart utility. Then a bit on the PR blurb caught my eyecreating Windows To Go drives (portable Windows) from any version of Windows 8. Formerly, this was only possible with the Enterprise version. Game on. Partition Assistant comes in two flavorsStandard (free) and Pro (49). The standard version has everything the average user needs: partition splitting, copying, resizing, creation, deletion, formatting, property changes (e.g., active to inactive), and even secure wiping. There are also helpful wizards for copying, resizing, converting from NTFS to FAT32 and vice versa, plus migrating to a new hard drive or SSD. The program creates bootable Windows PE (Pre-install Environment) discs as well. The Pro version adds the ability to convert Windows dynamic disks to basic disks, change partitions from logical to primary, alter partition IDs and serial numbers, convert disks from MBR to GPT and back again, as well as allocate free space from one partition to another. If all that sounds rather esoteric, you dont need the professional version. But those are undeniably handy features for IT types that need to manipulate and maintain drives and partitions on a regular basis. Partition Assistant provides wizards for many tasks, but the main window disappearing is a bit of a visual jolt. Partition Assistants interface will be familiar to anyone whos used such a utility in the last decade or so. Theres a list of tasks to the left and a pane displaying your systems drives and partitions to the right. Simply choose the drive or partition, then apply an action from the task list. Its all perfectly simple, assuming you understand drives and partitions. Theyre easy-to-use and work well, but the language is sometimes shaky (for English users) and the main window disappears for some reasonan odd visual jolt. In practice, my first try resulted in a program-halting error. Aomei Partition Assistant Make Bootable Download In PlaceI emailed Aomei, and they had a fixed version for download in place the next day. It worked perfectly, creating a bootable version of Window 8.1 Pro. Quick work that. Kudos. Aomei Partition Assistant Make Bootable Windows 8.1 Professional RunningWindows 8.1 Professional running from a 64GB Sandisk Extreme Flash drive. Aside from using the Professional, rather than the Enterprise version of Windows 8.1, I also employed a non-certified 64GB flash drive. Microsoft only tech supports certain certified drives, of which theres a list on the Windows To Go Web site.
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