Paragon Alignment Tool at Giveaway of the Day

So I saw that this is available for a free download today:

Giveaway of the Day - free licensed software daily. Paragon Alignment Tool Special Edition (English Version) - Paragon Alignment Tool Special Edition is the tool that aligns partitions in a single operation!

What caught my eye is that it claims to work on a SSD, "Significantly increases endurance of SSD drives" as they put it. I've used other Paragon products before but have not heard of or tried this program before. If it works, then it would appear to be a solution for SSDs that are not aligned, as well as a solution if one chooses to use a cloning program (Acronis, etc) when cloning and installing a new drive.

Thoughts? Anyone care to try/test it? I have too much stuff on my two ssds to test the program but I figured others here might be able to.

 

Seems like a tool that is only really good for SSD users, but I am getting it anyways since its free to see if it has any usefull hdd tools.

 

Ok I cant say I recommend this at all right now it just broke my computer.

There is only one option/thing it does after install it analyzes your drives to see if they are properly aligned and gives you the option to align them.

On my G73 with dual 500gb drives it said that the recovery partition was properly aligned, but my OS partition and my 2nd drive were not optimally aligned so I clicked the magic button and let it do its thing.

It does a restart so it can run from outside of windows.

It went to a screen saying it was checking disk integrity and releasing disk buffer or something. Looked frozen as it stayed on this screen not making any progress for a good 30 minutes.

I figured with two 500gb drives that are both nearly full it may just take a while so I went to do some work. About 30 minutes later I come back to the black screen telling me I need to select the proper boot device.

Tried messing around in bios and stuff to no avail I cant boot and have no clue what this thing did to my drives. I hope I can fix it as I have a TON of data on there.

First thing I need to try is a repair with a windows 7 disk that I have at home. If that does not fix it then I guess some disk utilities may fix it.

Anybody have a clue what I may need to do to fix this and get back to working state without a clean install?

 

I got this about 6 months ago when they had a free special. I've only had one system where it wouldn't align and that's probably because I used to have Steadystate installed. I've aligned all my XP VMs (and real machines) with it and it benefits more than just SSD's.

If you have alot of data, it's going to take awhile to PA it as all that data has to be moved. The software does have some caveats and I've posted over in their forums.

 

I used it several months ago from another free special, it aligned my ssd. No problems for me.

 

I'd recommend gparted. It has an "align to MB" option and it works quite well. I've used it a few times and it worked without destroying my HDD data as Vicious reports.

 

I've been hit. It was on an external drive, too. T_T

 

"Facepalm" What were you thinking man. Hope you had your data backed up? From reading your posts this in not like you do do something like this.
Let us know what ends up happening

 

Im still working on fresh install all day is what happened

I may have been able to recover if I had used the right program from the start but after using the wrong programs to fix the partition I lost it all.

I had a ton of stuff on there that I wont be able to replace easy but I am starting on the basics and doing my best to get it going again.

 

I downloaded it and it said that all of my NTFS partitions were properly aligned, but that it could align my external FAT32 drive. It took overnight to do a 250 GB drive on a USB 2 connection. It is getting uninstalled very soon.

 

For me, it took overnight and in the morning there was an error and my files were gone. I'm no masochist, but I really don't know why I even bothered doing this.

 

This reminds me of when I discovered Partition Magic about a decade ago.

Took me a long time (almost two weeks) to realize that the benefits it offered were far outweighed by the risks involved.

In the end, simply doing a clean install (with the partition strategy already thought out) was faster and much less risky than playing/wasting time with PM.

A tool like this is best used to see if your partitions are aligned - and if not, weighing the pros/cons of reinstalling your O/S onto an aligned partition.

This is just another example of using the latest O/S (Win7) and doing a clean install in the first place.

 

arg got you too eh? even after I posted that it killed my files.

I should have not tried to fix my partition with GParted and waited till I could pull my hdd out and run the EASEUS partition recovery program, I maybe would have saved my data that way.

It was dumb of me to not have a backup, but I really didnt think that a paid program would be so prone to error and destroy my partition/data.