best partitioniong tool for large sata drives for win/linux installs

[dblazen]

having all kinds of problems trying to partition my new build & put win and linux on there.

been using acronis & keep getting partition errors + it sez any partition formatted ext3 by linux (debian-lenny) is 'unsupported file system'.

i have 1 640gb & 2 750gb sata western digital hard drives with gigabyte ep45-ds3r mobo.

[Sylvander]

1. Take a look at the UBCD4Win (http://www.ubcd4win.com/) list of tools (http://www.ubcd4win.com/contents.htm), especially for working with partitions.
e.g. TestDisk (http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk) looks interesting.

2. Paragon Hard Disk Manager 8.5 SE (http://www.computeractive.co.uk/paragon/index) is still available for FREE until Oct 21st 2008 at this linked location.
It can be used to make a bootable "Recovery Media" so operations can be carried out from outside of the Windows OS loaded from the HDD.
Unfortunately, this free version of the recovery media doesn't work with USB devices, but will work with your internal HDD's.
The version run within Windows DOES work with USB.
It's very comprehensive; so far I've noticed that the DEFRAG capability is particularly good [better than all others I've tried].
It will display all the [seen] partitions with their info, and can "Undelete Partitions" and "Check File System Integrity" and lots of other partition stuff.
Would be nice to play around with to see if anything interesting shows.
Grab it while available for free! :)