Active@ Partition Manager is a freeware Windows utility for creating, resizing, formatting and deleting partitions on hard disks and USB storage. It works with the space assigned to volumes and the unallocated areas around them, letting users change a disk’s organization while Windows is running. Most configuration changes take effect immediately.
Active@ Partition Manager’s disk view
When Active@ Partition Manager starts, it gathers information about connected storage devices and their volumes. A table groups partitions under their parent disks, while a corresponding device layout shows how each disk is divided. Selecting a partition in one view also selects it in the other. Its type, file system, readiness and capacity appear in the status bar, so the selected volume can be identified before an operation begins.
The program recognizes more file systems than it can format or resize. Alongside FAT, exFAT and NTFS, it identifies volumes using ReFS, HFS+, Ext2, Ext3, Ext4, BtrFS, UFS, XFS and JFS.
Creating and resizing partitions
New partitions begin with unallocated space. The creation dialog lets users choose a primary partition, an extended partition or a logical drive inside an extended partition. Controls for the starting sector offset and partition size determine where the new area begins and how much space it occupies.
A drive letter and formatting options can be assigned during creation, or those actions can be left out. USB flash devices can contain several partitions rather than using their entire capacity as one volume.
For an existing volume, Active@ Partition Manager can extend it into unallocated space immediately after the partition or shrink it using unused space within the volume. The resize dialog offers maximum expansion, shrinking to the last used cluster and a custom size. A draggable control provides an approximate visual adjustment, while the custom option sets an exact capacity. The position of free space therefore affects whether a volume can be expanded.
Deleting a partition has a different result: its area becomes unallocated space, and the data it contained is lost. That area can then become the starting point for a new partition layout.
File systems
Formatting prepares a partition with FAT, exFAT or NTFS. Users choose the file system, volume label and allocation-unit size, then select a quick or full format. Quick formatting removes file-table entries without scanning the disk for bad sectors. The program can also format USB flash storage as NTFS and create FAT32 partitions above 32 GB, up to 1 TB.
Drive letters and labels can be changed separately through the attributes dialog. The letter selector shows letters that are not already assigned to other devices. Changing a letter also changes the path used to reach the volume, which affects applications that still refer to the previous letter.
Disk structures
Active@ Partition Manager can initialize a disk with an MBR or GPT partition scheme and convert between those schemes. It also provides repair functions for damaged MBR or GPT structures and can mark a partition as active.
For lower-level work, boot sectors and the partition table can be edited and synchronized. Boot-sector support covers FAT, exFAT, NTFS, UFS, HFS+ and Ext2/Ext3/Ext4.
Layout rollback
The program automatically saves restore information for certain layout changes, including disk initialization and partition creation, formatting or deletion. Its rollback dialog presents restore points in chronological order. Selecting a point applies the corresponding saved partition-layout state to the chosen physical disk.
This rollback function covers saved layout changes. Detecting and restoring a lost partition independently, recovering deleted files and rebuilding damaged RAID storage belong to the separate Active@ UNDELETE product.
