5 ms·

I worked on a disk utility in the 90s called PartitionMagic that was one of the first ones to let you dynamically resize disk partitions. Maybe Samsung used th

I worked on a disk utility in the 90s called PartitionMagic that was one of the first ones to let you dynamically resize disk partitions. Maybe Samsung used that when naming their product. I am old, but I miss the days when the install process was copy . to /<appFolder> and the uninstall process was delete /<appFolder>

whatsupdog 6mo ago
PartionMagic was not A disk utility, it was THE disk utility!
- didgetmaster 6mo ago
  I also headed up a disk imaging product for the same company called Drive Image. It wasn't quite as popular, but it was fun to develop as well.
  - user3939382 6mo ago
    You were competing with Norton Ghost at the time IIRC. Partition Magic was an amazing piece of software. It was so good when you explained “called Partition Magic” I was like “called”? It was so clearly the best of its kind it didn’t even occur to me that these years later people wouldn’t know of it, it felt like reading “I worked on a search engine called Google”. Anyway thanks for the great software.
    - didgetmaster 6mo ago
      I mainly mentioned it that way because once the company (PowerQuest) was bought out by Symantec, the product was mostly abandoned. Unlike Google, most programmers younger than 30 have never heard of it.
riffraff 6mo ago
I remember that! It was awesome!
- kaonwarb 6mo ago
  Ditto. Worked perfectly and nice UI. Great work!
deleted 6mo ago
[deleted]
rvba 6mo ago
Windows is the same now. Due to "new and better" approach, each program puts its data in 5 different folders for "multi user" reasons. What is infuriating that all those folders are hidden and all of them are on C: drive. So your C: drive gets clogged. This makes it impossible to track how much space each program uses. (On a side note its been years since floppy drives were the A: drive... and yet we are still stuck with the primary disk being called C:)
- dylan604 6mo ago
  > (On a side note its been yeara since floppy drives were the A: drive... and yet we are still stuck with the primary disc being called C:) The logic behind that is pretty obvious isn't it?
  - klez 6mo ago
    Unless you mean retrocompatibility, no it's not that obvious to me.
    - maccard 6mo ago
      I think it's clearly back compatability.
    - dylan604 6mo ago
      yes. obviously, if your whole entire being and everything known about your os is that the main drive where the os is installed is c:\, then suddenly changing that to a:\ because floppy drives fell out of fashion would being nothing short of absolute chaos. you'd be amazed at the number of times c:\ is hard coded into things. It would be like swapping the brake and accelerator pedals. It would be like switching the sky to green and grass to blue. It would be total anarchy. Okay, maybe it wouldn't be that bad, but it wouldn't be good. At least for the dolt that called their system drive a:\
  - thesuitonym 6mo ago
    If you plug a USB floppy drive in, and put a diskette in it, it's still A:.
colechristensen 6mo ago
Lots of Mac software is still like this minus possible leftovers in a few other folders for uninstall.
GeekyBear 6mo ago
When a user mode application on the Mac doesn't just allow you to drag the app into the applications folder to install, it's a red huge red flag. Personally, I'd look for another alternative from a company that better understands the Mac. Chrome, for instance, previously used an installer that had to run with administrative permissions and famously ended up rendering systems unbootable. System utilities and drivers are the exception, since they have to modify system folders to install. Partition Magic was pretty awesome, BTW.
- everdrive 6mo ago
  >When a user mode application on the Mac doesn't just allow you to drag the app into the applications folder to install, it's a red huge red flag. And the companies that make such products _never_ care about making sure an uninstallation is actually clean.
  - ryandrake 6mo ago
    "Does it have a way to uninstall, and does that uninstallation clean every application artifact?" is such a great litmus test for just how much a software company actually cares about having a proper finished product that respects the user. Nobody forces a company to do it, but when they don't do it, you can probably bet that they're cutting corners and disrespecting the user's machine in other ways, too. It's like "Do you return your shopping cart to the cart storage or leave it in the carpark?" You're allowed to just shove your cart away and drive off, but people who do that are highly probably assholes in other ways, too.
    - GeekyBear 6mo ago
      Well said. I would add an appreciation for companies producing non-bloated, native software.
  - al_borland 6mo ago
    In the file menu of the installer, there is generally an option to see all the files it is placing on the system with full system paths. I generally note this down so I can make sure to clean things up completely if/when needed. For app that just get dragged into the Applications folder, they end up doing all this additional file creation on first-launch instead of via an installer. That actually makes it harder. For those I tend to search the ~/Library folder for the name of the app and the company that made it, hoping I find all the remnants to delete. There are apps, like AppZapper and AppCleaner, which try to automate this process. I still think it’s ridiculous that Apple never solved for this. It’s one of the reasons I always do a manual migration to a new Mac. It feels like the only real way to clean things up.
Sarkie 6mo ago
Thank you for such a great product
- didgetmaster 6mo ago
  Glad you liked it. I still have fond memories of working on it.
shantara 6mo ago
Partition Magic was among the first utilities recommended to me by my more experienced water I got my first PC. It served me well for many years since!
izacus 6mo ago
> I am old, but I miss the days when the install process was copy . to /<appFolder> and the uninstall process was delete /<appFolder> I don't remember this ever being the case, even in times of DOS.
- maccard 6mo ago
  It still is for a lot of Mac Apps. You download a DMG, and you get somethinglike [0] where you drag the icon over, and it installs. The last app I uninstalled also removed the matching Library Support folders, which was neat! [0] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/8680132/creating-nice-dmg-installer-for-mac-os-x https://stackoverflow.com/questions/8680132/creating-nice-dm...
- embedding-shape 6mo ago
  I remember software, tools and some games shipping like this forever, typically they have a "portable" label slapped on them, bet you can find Windows software/games still shipped like this today, if you look for "-portable" or "-archive" rather than "installer". One quick example, offers an installer or a ZIP archive, the "installation process" for the ZIP archive is basically "copy files out from archive && ./executable", installer does a bunch of other stuff: https://www.openttd.org/downloads/openttd-releases/latest https://www.openttd.org/downloads/openttd-releases/latest
  - izacus 6mo ago
    Yes, but that was never really a default. Even DOS software came with installers and messed with AUTEXEC.
    - embedding-shape 6mo ago
      Sure, but it was (and still is, in some circles) relatively uncommon. I wouldn't claim "that was never the case", unless if you're only talking specifically about DOS I suppose.
  - deleted 6mo ago
    [deleted]
postalcoder 6mo ago
> I worked on a disk utility in the 90s called PartitionMagic PartitionMagic was a S-Tier windows utility. Thank you.
natebc 6mo ago
hey, thanks for partitionmagic, it was amazing.
deleted 6mo ago
[deleted]
ncr100 6mo ago
[ Thank you for "PartitionMagic" - crucially important for home / personal computer users, at least in my own history. ] And, I wonder if a (corporate) development organization's overall cultural friction around critical / negative feedback -- in this case integration issues in the technical sense of pulling together modules built by subteams to compose a final product -- could be worth investigating when challenging metrics like the above are identified? This "18 steps" seems like a problem. And I wonder if it's a prioritized concern at SAM. SNARK: The "magic" could be how corporate culture is communicated to users merely through usage of Samsung Magician.
- didgetmaster 6mo ago
  Thank you and to all the others who remember and liked PartitonMagic. It makes an old programmer feel good to know that something he worked on 30 years ago made a difference. BTW: I am currently working on a hobby project called Didgets. It is an object store that does a lot of cool file system stuff and relational table manipulation and analysis. It is available for free download at http://www.didgets.com http://www.didgets.com The install process is to unzip the downloaded file to a directory. The uninstall process is to delete that directory.
  - DougN7 6mo ago
    I LOVED Partition Magic. It really was magic!
    - ahartmetz 6mo ago
      It was pretty important at the time to make room for dual-booting Linux. Linux setup tools couldn't do it back then, particularly shrinking FAT let alone NTFS filesystems. PartitionMagic made it super easy. It felt slightly wrong to need a Windows software to install Linux, but great tool.
      - didgetmaster 6mo ago
        I joined the startup making PartitionMagic after I saw a prototype. I had just wasted another half day repartitioning my 80MB hard drive so I could dual boot OS/2 while working at Novell.
acheron 6mo ago
I read the HN title and literally thought to myself “‘disk utility’? What, like PartitionMagic?” Then this was the top comment. Thanks for PartitionMagic; what a great program.
alkz 6mo ago
Oh I used that all the time, it was so awersome! back in the day it really felt like magic...
pimlottc 6mo ago
PartitionMagic was in every geeks toolbox back in the day, amazing and always reliable, saved so much time! Thank you!
harikb 6mo ago
Thank you for PartitionMagic!! I remember using it to undo whatever disk partitioning mistake I did when originally setting up a machine :)
deleted 6mo ago
[deleted]
wrxd 6mo ago
Partition Magic was indeed magic. Thanks for the great work you did on it!
EliRivers 6mo ago
Thank you for PartitionMagic. In the late nineties I cut my teeth repeatedly building and breaking windows PCs. PartitionMagic was a core tool. I regularly see its echoes today in GParted.
VMG 6mo ago
blast from the past - peak of UX! https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norton_Partition_Magic#/media/Datei:Norton_Partition_Magic.png https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norton_Partition_Magic#/media/...
throw0101c 6mo ago
> I am old, but I miss the days when the install process was copy . to /<appFolder> and the uninstall process was delete /<appFolder> .app 'files' on macOS are like this.
efitz 6mo ago
That was an awesome app, I loved it. Thank you.
zerr 6mo ago
This is HN, so please share same war stories, tech stuff, etc... Thanks!
- didgetmaster 6mo ago
  Since we had to shift (i.e. copy) blocks of data around in order to dynamically resize partitions that were formatted with FAT, NTFS, or HPFS file systems; we had to know the internal structures of each of them. It's been a long time, but I seem to remember that there were a few areas that were not documented well by Microsoft and we had to guess what certain fields meant. Because we often had to move file contents around, some files became more fragmented while others became less fragmented since we tried to be smart about where we moved file blocks. My biggest takeaway was understanding file system architecture. For some features, I was impressed by what their architects designed. For others, I wondered why on Earth they did it 'that way'. I started keeping a list of things I wanted to be different and eventually incorporated many of them in my new object store design. http://www.didgets.com http://www.didgets.com
- didgetmaster 6mo ago
  Our UI guy (a good friend of mine from college) did a really good job of making our DOS app look like a windows app. The first version of our disk imaging product (Drive Image) was not so polished because I was the only one working on both the engine code and the UI layer. Once that started selling we'll, they assigned someone to help me with later versions.
nunez 6mo ago
Blast from the past! I’ve definitely used this. Thanks for helping make it!
nunez 6mo ago
It’s still like that for most software!

whatsupdog 6mo ago

PartionMagic was not A disk utility, it was THE disk utility!

didgetmaster 6mo ago
I also headed up a disk imaging product for the same company called Drive Image. It wasn't quite as popular, but it was fun to develop as well.
- user3939382 6mo ago
  You were competing with Norton Ghost at the time IIRC. Partition Magic was an amazing piece of software. It was so good when you explained “called Partition Magic” I was like “called”? It was so clearly the best of its kind it didn’t even occur to me that these years later people wouldn’t know of it, it felt like reading “I worked on a search engine called Google”. Anyway thanks for the great software.
  - didgetmaster 6mo ago
    I mainly mentioned it that way because once the company (PowerQuest) was bought out by Symantec, the product was mostly abandoned. Unlike Google, most programmers younger than 30 have never heard of it.

riffraff 6mo ago

I remember that! It was awesome!

kaonwarb 6mo ago
Ditto. Worked perfectly and nice UI. Great work!

deleted 6mo ago

[deleted]

rvba 6mo ago

Windows is the same now. Due to "new and better" approach, each program puts its data in 5 different folders for "multi user" reasons. What is infuriating that all those folders are hidden and all of them are on C: drive. So your C: drive gets clogged. This makes it impossible to track how much space each program uses. (On a side note its been years since floppy drives were the A: drive... and yet we are still stuck with the primary disk being called C:)

dylan604 6mo ago
> (On a side note its been yeara since floppy drives were the A: drive... and yet we are still stuck with the primary disc being called C:) The logic behind that is pretty obvious isn't it?
- klez 6mo ago
  Unless you mean retrocompatibility, no it's not that obvious to me.
  - maccard 6mo ago
    I think it's clearly back compatability.
  - dylan604 6mo ago
    yes. obviously, if your whole entire being and everything known about your os is that the main drive where the os is installed is c:\, then suddenly changing that to a:\ because floppy drives fell out of fashion would being nothing short of absolute chaos. you'd be amazed at the number of times c:\ is hard coded into things. It would be like swapping the brake and accelerator pedals. It would be like switching the sky to green and grass to blue. It would be total anarchy. Okay, maybe it wouldn't be that bad, but it wouldn't be good. At least for the dolt that called their system drive a:\
- thesuitonym 6mo ago
  If you plug a USB floppy drive in, and put a diskette in it, it's still A:.

colechristensen 6mo ago

Lots of Mac software is still like this minus possible leftovers in a few other folders for uninstall.

GeekyBear 6mo ago

When a user mode application on the Mac doesn't just allow you to drag the app into the applications folder to install, it's a red huge red flag. Personally, I'd look for another alternative from a company that better understands the Mac. Chrome, for instance, previously used an installer that had to run with administrative permissions and famously ended up rendering systems unbootable. System utilities and drivers are the exception, since they have to modify system folders to install. Partition Magic was pretty awesome, BTW.

everdrive 6mo ago
>When a user mode application on the Mac doesn't just allow you to drag the app into the applications folder to install, it's a red huge red flag. And the companies that make such products _never_ care about making sure an uninstallation is actually clean.
- ryandrake 6mo ago
  "Does it have a way to uninstall, and does that uninstallation clean every application artifact?" is such a great litmus test for just how much a software company actually cares about having a proper finished product that respects the user. Nobody forces a company to do it, but when they don't do it, you can probably bet that they're cutting corners and disrespecting the user's machine in other ways, too. It's like "Do you return your shopping cart to the cart storage or leave it in the carpark?" You're allowed to just shove your cart away and drive off, but people who do that are highly probably assholes in other ways, too.
  - GeekyBear 6mo ago
    Well said. I would add an appreciation for companies producing non-bloated, native software.
- al_borland 6mo ago
  In the file menu of the installer, there is generally an option to see all the files it is placing on the system with full system paths. I generally note this down so I can make sure to clean things up completely if/when needed. For app that just get dragged into the Applications folder, they end up doing all this additional file creation on first-launch instead of via an installer. That actually makes it harder. For those I tend to search the ~/Library folder for the name of the app and the company that made it, hoping I find all the remnants to delete. There are apps, like AppZapper and AppCleaner, which try to automate this process. I still think it’s ridiculous that Apple never solved for this. It’s one of the reasons I always do a manual migration to a new Mac. It feels like the only real way to clean things up.

Sarkie 6mo ago

Thank you for such a great product

didgetmaster 6mo ago
Glad you liked it. I still have fond memories of working on it.

shantara 6mo ago

Partition Magic was among the first utilities recommended to me by my more experienced water I got my first PC. It served me well for many years since!

izacus 6mo ago

> I am old, but I miss the days when the install process was copy . to /<appFolder> and the uninstall process was delete /<appFolder> I don't remember this ever being the case, even in times of DOS.

maccard 6mo ago
It still is for a lot of Mac Apps. You download a DMG, and you get somethinglike [0] where you drag the icon over, and it installs. The last app I uninstalled also removed the matching Library Support folders, which was neat! [0] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/8680132/creating-nice-dmg-installer-for-mac-os-x https://stackoverflow.com/questions/8680132/creating-nice-dm...
embedding-shape 6mo ago
I remember software, tools and some games shipping like this forever, typically they have a "portable" label slapped on them, bet you can find Windows software/games still shipped like this today, if you look for "-portable" or "-archive" rather than "installer". One quick example, offers an installer or a ZIP archive, the "installation process" for the ZIP archive is basically "copy files out from archive && ./executable", installer does a bunch of other stuff: https://www.openttd.org/downloads/openttd-releases/latest https://www.openttd.org/downloads/openttd-releases/latest
- izacus 6mo ago
  Yes, but that was never really a default. Even DOS software came with installers and messed with AUTEXEC.
  - embedding-shape 6mo ago
    Sure, but it was (and still is, in some circles) relatively uncommon. I wouldn't claim "that was never the case", unless if you're only talking specifically about DOS I suppose.
- deleted 6mo ago
  [deleted]

postalcoder 6mo ago

> I worked on a disk utility in the 90s called PartitionMagic PartitionMagic was a S-Tier windows utility. Thank you.

natebc 6mo ago

hey, thanks for partitionmagic, it was amazing.

deleted 6mo ago

[deleted]

ncr100 6mo ago

[ Thank you for "PartitionMagic" - crucially important for home / personal computer users, at least in my own history. ] And, I wonder if a (corporate) development organization's overall cultural friction around critical / negative feedback -- in this case integration issues in the technical sense of pulling together modules built by subteams to compose a final product -- could be worth investigating when challenging metrics like the above are identified? This "18 steps" seems like a problem. And I wonder if it's a prioritized concern at SAM. SNARK: The "magic" could be how corporate culture is communicated to users merely through usage of Samsung Magician.

didgetmaster 6mo ago
Thank you and to all the others who remember and liked PartitonMagic. It makes an old programmer feel good to know that something he worked on 30 years ago made a difference. BTW: I am currently working on a hobby project called Didgets. It is an object store that does a lot of cool file system stuff and relational table manipulation and analysis. It is available for free download at http://www.didgets.com http://www.didgets.com The install process is to unzip the downloaded file to a directory. The uninstall process is to delete that directory.
- DougN7 6mo ago
  I LOVED Partition Magic. It really was magic!
  - ahartmetz 6mo ago
    It was pretty important at the time to make room for dual-booting Linux. Linux setup tools couldn't do it back then, particularly shrinking FAT let alone NTFS filesystems. PartitionMagic made it super easy. It felt slightly wrong to need a Windows software to install Linux, but great tool.
    - didgetmaster 6mo ago
      I joined the startup making PartitionMagic after I saw a prototype. I had just wasted another half day repartitioning my 80MB hard drive so I could dual boot OS/2 while working at Novell.

acheron 6mo ago

I read the HN title and literally thought to myself “‘disk utility’? What, like PartitionMagic?” Then this was the top comment. Thanks for PartitionMagic; what a great program.

alkz 6mo ago

Oh I used that all the time, it was so awersome! back in the day it really felt like magic...

pimlottc 6mo ago

PartitionMagic was in every geeks toolbox back in the day, amazing and always reliable, saved so much time! Thank you!

harikb 6mo ago

Thank you for PartitionMagic!! I remember using it to undo whatever disk partitioning mistake I did when originally setting up a machine :)

deleted 6mo ago

[deleted]

wrxd 6mo ago

Partition Magic was indeed magic. Thanks for the great work you did on it!

EliRivers 6mo ago

Thank you for PartitionMagic. In the late nineties I cut my teeth repeatedly building and breaking windows PCs. PartitionMagic was a core tool. I regularly see its echoes today in GParted.

VMG 6mo ago

blast from the past - peak of UX! https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norton_Partition_Magic#/media/Datei:Norton_Partition_Magic.png https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norton_Partition_Magic#/media/...

throw0101c 6mo ago

> I am old, but I miss the days when the install process was copy . to /<appFolder> and the uninstall process was delete /<appFolder> .app 'files' on macOS are like this.

efitz 6mo ago

That was an awesome app, I loved it. Thank you.

zerr 6mo ago

This is HN, so please share same war stories, tech stuff, etc... Thanks!

didgetmaster 6mo ago
Since we had to shift (i.e. copy) blocks of data around in order to dynamically resize partitions that were formatted with FAT, NTFS, or HPFS file systems; we had to know the internal structures of each of them. It's been a long time, but I seem to remember that there were a few areas that were not documented well by Microsoft and we had to guess what certain fields meant. Because we often had to move file contents around, some files became more fragmented while others became less fragmented since we tried to be smart about where we moved file blocks. My biggest takeaway was understanding file system architecture. For some features, I was impressed by what their architects designed. For others, I wondered why on Earth they did it 'that way'. I started keeping a list of things I wanted to be different and eventually incorporated many of them in my new object store design. http://www.didgets.com http://www.didgets.com
didgetmaster 6mo ago
Our UI guy (a good friend of mine from college) did a really good job of making our DOS app look like a windows app. The first version of our disk imaging product (Drive Image) was not so polished because I was the only one working on both the engine code and the UI layer. Once that started selling we'll, they assigned someone to help me with later versions.

nunez 6mo ago

Blast from the past! I’ve definitely used this. Thanks for helping make it!

nunez 6mo ago

It’s still like that for most software!