Acronis Disk Director Suite 10 Review

[Captain Crunch]

Acronis Disk Director Suite 10

Acronis Disk Director Suite version 10 comes from the same company who produced the Acronis True Image software many of of us have come to relay on for our back up protection needs.

We all know the True Image package is a well rounded package with a lot of great features and the Acronis Disk Director Suite 10 is no exception!

Acronis Disk Director Suite is four products in one.

• Acronis Partition Expert
• Acronis OS Selector
• Acronis Recovery Expert
• Acronis Disk Editor

The Acronis Partition Expert is my favorite out of the four and is extremely handy. With Partition Expert you can resize, move, copy, split, and merge hard drive partitions (drive letter) – all this without any data loss!

Using Partition Expert, you can split your C drive into 2 (or more) drive letters: you can use the C drive for Windows files only say, 10 to 30GB or what ever you would like. Then, set the rest of the drive as your D drive. You can then use the D drive to store all your other user data on such as downloads, programs, games music etc.

This is what my C drive looked like. I then decided I didn't like having to send downloads to a different drive (drive D) all the time. Since I purchased a second hard drive I just back every thing up on my new G drive. I decided I wanted to take my partitioned drive C and up it from 30GB to the full 250GB's. I could do this one of two ways. I could resize the C drive to basicly take all the space the D drive was using since it's the same hard drive. Or I could merge the two hard drive partitions.

In this case I chose to resize

Wow was this a breeze. Using the wizard was a snap about 5 clicks of the mouse and whalaa presto changeo my C drive went from the partitioned 30GB to the now the full 250GB.

Acronis Boot Manager is a multi-boot software utility that allows you to install multiple operating systems on your PC . With this software utility you can throw on an older version of Windows or for you who like to go a little less mainstream maybe a version of Linux? Regardless being able to boot from two different operating systems could come in very handy.

Acronis Recovery Expert allows you to recover accidentally lost or deleted partitions. This is a wonderful tool to have at your disposable in case of an emergency such an major virus attack or something even worse. Supported file systems: FAT16, FAT32, NTFS, HPFS, Linux Ext2, Ext3, ReiserFS, Linux Swap

Acronis Disk Editor is a disk-drive repair tool that allows you to perform advanced operations on your hard-disk drive, such as restoration of boot records and hexadecimal editing.

Now the hexadecimal editing will definitely be for the advanced user but the back up of the Master Boot Record we all can appreciate. If you have ever encountered or remembering hearing a friend agonizing over the loss of his data because he or she had to reformat the drive, because of the dreaded (Operating System Not Found) error then this disk drive repair tool is for you. Supports IDE, SCSI, USB, IEEE 1394 hard disk drives.

System requirements

• A PC-compatible computer with a Pentium or similar CPU
• 128 MB RAM
• A floppy or a CD-RW/DVD-RW drive
• A mouse (recommended)

Supported operating systems

• New! Windows XP Professional x64 Edition
• Windows XP SP 2
• Windows 2000 Professional SP 4
• Windows NT 4.0 Workstation SP 6
• Windows Me
• Windows 98 SE

Conclusion: Acronis Disk Director 10 is a outstanding set of utilities for people who use more than the old standard one partition or need to use more than one operating system and lets not forget the the ease of mind that comes with an Master Boot Record back up.

Pros: Easy to use, nice wizard, good features,

Cons: No manual ( but didn't feel I needed it)