Overview

If you regularly manage a large number of hard drives, partitions, and operating systems on your computer, you may have found the default disk management tools included with Windows to be somewhat lacking.  Not only are they difficult at times to use, but they also lack many features needed to work with multiple operating systems.  Acronis Disk Director 11 Home is a tool that can come in handy for these scenarios, as it brings many advanced disk management tools to your Windows environment.  Even if you’re working with multiple operating systems such as Linux and older versions of Windows, Disk Director can help you keep everything working smoothly with support for a wide range of file systems and a unique optional boot loader.

Key Features

• Manage disks and partitions with advanced yet easy-to-use tools
• Restore deleted partitions and recover data with bootable recovery media
• Organize and boot from multiple operating systems with Acronis Loader

Installation

Setting up Disk Director 11 isn’t too hard, but strangely the installer opens a XP-style launcher when you run it.  Click Install Acronis Disk Director Home to install it.

The setup took several minutes to load files

and then opened a standard installer.

You’ll be asked to enter your license key, but you can leave the field blank if you wish to install a demo version of Disk Director.  Acronis product keys are an astonishing 64 characters long, so make sure you enter it correctly.

Please Note: The demo version of Disk Director is limited to changes of 100Mb, so unless you’re managing very small partitions, the demo would basically only let you look around the program and see its features.

If you choose to install a demo version, you’ll be required to enter your name and contact info.  If you do not wish to receive marketing materials from Acronis, make sure to uncheck the box at the bottom.

After this, setup proceeded fairly quickly, though it confusingly opened the launch screen again when setup was finished.  Simply exit it, and then you can run Acronis Disk Director.  We wish the setup process could have been simpler, and it reminded us of installing software years ago.

Features And Use

Acronis Disk Director 11’s interface is very easy to use with a modern design, unlike its installer.  You can quickly see all of your drives and partitions, including USB harddrives and flash memory cards.

Select a drive or partition from the list or the graphics at the bottom of the window, and then you can select a variety of operations to perform on the volume.  Disk Director lets you resize, move, copy, merge, split volumes, among other operations.  All of these features work on any drive, including your default system partition.

Each operation opens a wizard window that actually gets straight to the task.  We were able to perform most of the operations in only a couple clicks.  You can graphically resize volumes, or enter the precise size you want in the fields.

If you wish to format unallocated space, select Unallocated under your drive list, and then click Create volume on the sidebar.

Disk Director supports creating basic, simple, spanned, striped, or mirrored volumes.

You can also select from a wide variety of file systems when formatting volumes, including NTFS, ReiserFS, Linux Swap, and more.

Most operations will not automatically take effect, so once you’re ready to actually format or resize drives, click the Commit pending operations button on the top of the window.

This will show you the pending operations; click Continue to apply the changes you’ve selected.

Some of the disk management features, such as resizing your primary Windows partition, require you to reboot Windows.  Acronis will then perform its tasks in a pre-boot environment like the one used by ScanDisk.

Acronis Disk Director additionally lets you create a recovery disk that will include your Acronis tools to recover partitions and format drives.  You can choose to make this disk Linux-based or from Windows PE.  Note that creating a Windows PE-based recovery disk will require 1Gb+ download of the Windows Automated Installation Kit.

Interestingly, some of the features in Disk Director are simply a front-end for standard Windows features.  For example, Disk Director includes an option to defragment your drives, but this actually just runs the Windows defragment utility via command line.

Acronis OS Selector

If you regularly manage multiple operating systems natively installed on the same computer, you are likely used to the hassle of reinstalling or configuring the default Windows boot loader or a Linux boot loader such as Grub.  Disk Director tries to take the pain out of this process with the optional Acronis OS Selector.  Once Disk Director is installed, you’ll find a new link in your Start menu to install the OS Selector.

Run the setup as normal.

You’ll have to reboot your computer to complete the installation.

When your computer reboots, it will now load the Acronis Loader first.

This opens an XP-style window where you can select your operating system to boot.  Acronis should recognize most operating systems installed automatically.  If you have many operating systems installed, find the one you want and then double-click on it to start it.

Please Note: Acronis OS Selector did not recognize our Wubi installation of Ubuntu.  If you encounter this, check out our guide on Restoring the Wubi Bootloader.

You can also directly install a new operating system from this menu, so your boot options will be configured by Acronis Loader by default.  However, it seems to have CD/DVD drive detection turned off by default.  To activate it, select Startup Options in the Loader’s Options window, and uncheck the Do not load CD-ROM drivers box.

Now you can boot from a CD/DVD, and can start a new operating system installation directly from the OS Selector.

Do note that you can hide and even delete operating systems from Acronis Loader.  This could be a problem if the computer is being used by less technical users.

Support

Disk Director includes a fairly comprehensive help system that steps you through the tools it offers.  You can also download a Getting Started PDF from their product site to help you get started using Disk Director quickly and easily.

Additionally, if you encounter problems within your first month of usage, you can contact Acronis support via phone once for free or via email or chat for an unlimited number of times for free.  However, after the first month, support is billed per incident.

Conclusion

If you regularly need to configure partitions, mirror drives, and boot from multiple operating systems, Acronis Disk Director may be a good option.  Windows’ default disk management utilities have improved over the years, but they are still complicated to use and lack many common disk management features.  Additionally, XP users may find it even more useful, as it includes even fewer options to manage disks natively.  Despite its Home designation, Acronis Disk Director 11 Home could actually be used in a business setting as it is simply licensed perpetually for one computer, no matter how or where it is used.  No matter how or where you work, Disk Director will help you manage your hard disks more efficiently.

Acronis Disk Director 11 Home offers a limited trial edition as mentioned above, and a full license costs $49.99.  If you own a previous version of Disk Director, you can upgrade to Disk Director 11 for $29.99.

Works with Windows XP, Vista, and 7.

Download, buy, or upgrade Acronis Disk Director 11

Installation: 7

Ease of Use: 8

Features: 8

Performance: 7

Product Support: 8

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