When it comes to partitioning a hard disk drive or solid state drive, Windows users have plenty of free and paid tools to choose from. Most of the free tools out there offer similar functionalities, and hence, it’s really difficult a pick a good one from the list.

Partition wizard features

Ever since I discovered Partition Wizard Home (free) edition back in 2010, I have been using it and recommending it to my readers here on IntoWindows. I would say, it’s the best free partition manager out there and offers some advanced functionalities as well.

There are options to create, extend, delete, convert, hide and explore partition. And then there are advanced features such as convert GPT disk to MBR, extend partition without reboot, change clutter size without data loss, partition recovery, hard disk copy, rebuild MBR, and disk surface test.

The best thing about MiniTool Partition Wizard is that it offers you download an ISO file of Partition Wizard software so that you can manage your partitions without having to boot into Windows. This bootable CD of Partition Wizard, which is absolutely free, comes in handy in situations where you don’t have an operating system on the drive or the drive is not functioning properly.

MiniTool offers bootable CD ISO file for free and anyone can download the ISO file (~48MB) and burn it to a CD/DVD. However, unfortunately, the option to prepare a bootable USB of Partition Wizard is present only in Professional and higher editions.

If want to use the bootable copy of Partition Wizard on a PC without the optical drive, Partition Wizard bootable USB comes in handy. And, if you want to prepare Partition Wizard bootable USB without the Professional edition, you can do so by following the given below instructions.

Preparing Partition Wizard bootable USB without Professional edition

NOTE: We are simply transferring the ISO copy of Partition Wizard bootable CD (free) to USB with the help of third-party tools and is safe.

This method works great on all recent versions of Windows operating system, including Windows 10, Windows 8.1 and Windows 7.

Step 1: Visit this page of Partition Wizard and download Partition Wizard bootable ISO file. The size of the ISO image is about 48 MB.

Step 2: Once you have the ISO copy, download the popular Rufus, the best free tool out there to create bootable USBs.

Step 3: Connect your USB drive that you would like to use as the bootable media for Partition Wizard. Please backup all data from the USB before proceeding further, as we are going to format the drive.

Step 4: Launch Rufus, select your USB drive, select one of the partition schemes depending on your system.

MBR partition scheme for BIOS or UEFI computers (select it if your PC supports BIOS or UEFI and partition scheme is MBR)

GPT partition scheme for UEFI computer (select this if your PC supports UEFI and disk type is GPT)

MBR partition scheme for UEFI computer (select this one if your PC supports UEFI and disk type is MBR)

Step 5: Select the file system as FAT32 (Default), as it supports booting on both BIOS and UEFI machines. And then, browse to the Partition Wizard bootable CD ISO file by clicking the small CD drive image next to Create a bootable disk using option, select the ISO image, and then click Open.

Step 6: Finally, hit the Start button, click Yes when you see the warning dialog. And more importantly, if you see the following dialog box, please click Yes button to allow Rufus to replace the vesamenu.c32 file.

The process shouldn’t take more than 10 minutes. That’s it! You can now connect the USB drive to your PC and start using the Partition Wizard without booting into Windows.