A partition manager looks like a one-trick pony and you wonder why you should have to lay out so much to complete a single task... until you need to change the structure of your hard drive. Then, the thought of having to reformat it and reinstall everything to get Windows running becomes a nightmare. A utility which can do it all on the fly is suddenly no longer a luxury, but an essential.

Disk Director Suite 9 enables you to divide up existing partitions, create new ones and delete those which you no longer need. It does all this from within Windows and without losing any data in an active system. It works quite quickly, considering it's making fundamental changes to the file structure of your PC.

As something of a blast from the past, Disk Director Suite 9 includes a hexadecimal disk editor, so if you want to get deep down and dirty, you can. You need to know what you're doing, though, and we were concerned that when we tried to load a text file for viewing in the editor, the program asked us to confirm, told us the action was irreversible and promptly converted a different partition on our hard drive to RAW format. Good job we had a back-up. We've asked Acronis to explain this aberrant behaviour.

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Disk Director Suite comes with Acronis OS Selector, a boot manager which enables you to set up two or more partitions to hold different operating systems. Apart from the outlined problem with the disk editor, the utility works well and offers automatic as well as manual modes for the nervous and less expert.

As it stands, however, we don't feel comfortable recommending software which appears to work in this unpredictable fashion, particularly when data loss can result. The problem could be due to something we've done, but we don't think so.