NIUBI Partition Editor Pro is comparable to tools like AOMEI’s Partition Assistant & EaseUS Partition Master, with the 2 notable exceptions that it is available in a portable version, & you can create a bootable USB stick that works [those other 2 don’t if you use UEFI & Secure Boot], though that requires using another app, Rufus, to put the ISO that NIUBI Partition Editor Pro creates [it’s the only option] on a USB stick. DiskGenius is a potential alternative that’s also available in a portable version & can create a working bootable USB stick without requiring any extra steps, but it comes with with 2 drawbacks: DiskGenius does a Lot, so the GUI can be confusing, and the free version has limits on what it can do.
diskgenius[.]com/editions.php
Why be concerned about having a working bootable USB stick? Not every partitioning operation can be performed while Windows is running – you must boot to another OS. I have AOMEI Partition Assistant [from GOTD] installed on my Windows to Go drive, and use that, but if I didn’t have that drive I could rely on the USB stick, or I could rely on Partition Assistant to add the same files it puts on its USB stick to the hard disk, and then boot to that to do its job. And if the USB stick doesn’t work, the same files on the hard disk can’t be expected to do any better.
I had previously looked at the free version of NIUBI Partition Editor and found it too limiting – my AOMEI solution worked, and since I don’t often mess with partitions, I wasn’t in the market to buy the pro version. NUIBI advertises that their partition editor has a one second rollback feature but doesn’t talk about it in the software’s manual [that I could see]. When you use the app to alter a partition however, there’s a link to an online explanation of how it works… if the software detects that an operation is going to fail, it instantly reverts to a snapshot of the partition’s original configuration.
Something like that is more likely to be used when you’re trying to move a partition. The way it works is everything is loaded towards the start of a partition, with free space at the partition’s end. [That’s why it’s a good idea to defrag before working with a partition, squeezing all the data to the front, hopefully picking up any stray bits.] Because it’s all free space at the end, it’s not a big deal to shrink a partition by moving the end of the partition closer to the beginning. If you want to move the start or beginning of a partition, however, you’ve got to move all the data that’s stored there. Every partitioning operation carries risk, but moving a partition is the riskiest. As the NIUBI Partition Editor Pro manual says, it’s best to create an image backup 1st. Myself, I prefer to create that backup image, delete the existing partition, create a new one where I want, then restore the backup to that new partition – I think it tends to be both faster & safer. [Note: SSDs sort of pretend to be conventional hard disks as far as Windows is concerned. You’ll want to skip the defrag of course, but otherwise treat a partition on an SSD as if it was linear, like on a regular hard disk.]
Installing NIUBI Partition Editor Pro adds the program’s folder, plus a MDA_NTDRV.sys file to Windows\ System32\. That driver is commonly used by apps like AOMEI’s etc. and will likely already be there if you have something like AOMEI Partition Assistant installed. The registry gets an uninstall key plus one for the app & one for that driver. The portable version also adds that driver & its associated registry key. Note: if you save/use the portable version on a USB stick, you’ll want to delete the extra language files – while they are small, USB sticks don’t handle lots of small files all that efficiently [they waste space].