Without it, the partition sizes are forever fixed at the time the drive is first installed.

It does not support Microsoft’s proprietary dynamic partitioning scheme.

It lets you interconvert various types of Linux partition but it will not interconvert FAT32 ⇔ NTFS without losing the data.

It will create a bootable CD so that you can use the program when you hard disk is not bootable. You may restore a deleted partition from the unallocated space. If your MBR becomes corrupted, (which is usually why your disk becomes unbootable), you may boot with the Acronis Disk Director bootable CD and activate the Acronis OS Selector.

It is a much more friendly tool than PartitionMagic. For example you can just tell it which partition you would like to have more free space and from which partition to steal the space, and it does the rest. In PartitionMagic, you must accomplish that with many small steps of shrinking, sliding and growing partitions. Acronis’ documentation covers not only the program itself but much surrounding useful lore, like how to install and configure hard disks.

The boot manager is the most user friendly I have ever seen. It is a full mouse-driven GUI, with splashy artwork and icons, a technical marvel for something that runs without benefit of an OS. One interesting feature is the ability to temporarily hide partitions from an OS.

This program is a work of art. It is an unusual combination of high geek innards with an ultra friendly user interface. The author is a master of programming. Even the documentation is well done.

Tiny suggested improvements:

• Also show the drives in the selections by the names they are known inside the OSes, i.e. reassigned drive letters and volume name.
• Attempt to preserve drive reassignments when partitions are shrunk and grown.
• Fix the Create Bootable Media button. It does not work. You must do it from the start menu.
• Add the unallocated space chunks to the list of selectable possible sources of free space, defaulting all checked.
• Boot fixmbr and fixboot, or equivalent functionality on the bootable CD is case the master boot record is damaged.

It costs $50.00 USD .

Gotchas

• Make sure you uninstall the boot mananger before using recovery mode’s fixmbr or fixboot, otherwise the boot manager will carefully restore the boot record to its damaged state.
• Partitioning operations are inherently not-interruptible. Ideally you would want a UPS. Don’t run the utilities any time you think you might lose power, e.g. during a storm.
• When you move a partition, there must be a contiguous hole of unallocated space big enough to receive it. It won’t slide other partitions out the way to make room for it.