Acronis Disk Director Suite Review and Tutorial

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Partitioning a Hard Drive with Acronis Disk Director

Here is a review of the Acronis Disk Director Suite. We will attempt to resize the primary partition and create a new logical partition to gain some safe storage space for data. Here is a walkthrough of the process of creating a new partition using the Disk Director Suite. You can download a free trial of the Disk Director Suite so you can follow along with the tutorial.

The first thing to do is create a bootable rescue CD using the Acronis Media Builder just in case something does go wrong. This is the same as the other tutorial for the True Image bootable rescue CD except for the following screens where you need to choose the full version of the Acronis Disk Director.

Choose the Bootable Rescue Media Builder
Acronis Media Builder

This is the first screen you will see when the Acronis Disk Director Suite is started. I chose to run the user interface in manual mode so I could have full control of the program.

Select Interface Mode

The next screen shows the hard drive information. As you can see, there are two physical hard drives on this computer. There is an 80 gigabyte and a 160 gigabyte drive. For the purpose of this tutorial, I want to add another partition from the C Drive. I will be resizing the primary operating system drive. I want to do this to give me more storage space. It is not a good idea to store important data on the same partition as Windows just in case the operating system does a complete crash the data will still be accessible. I will choose the create a new partition Wizard.

Main Interface of the Acronis Disk Director Suite

I will then choose to create a new partition using both the unallocated space and the free space of the existing partitions. The existing partitions can be resized if necessary to give the space to the created partition.

Create Partition Wizard

Select the Hard drive to partition.

Select Hard Drive to Partition

Then select the partion to take the free space from. I selected the primary active partition.

Select Free Space to Use

Then you will need to specify the size of the partition. I chose to make it 100 gigabytes which leaves about 60 gigabytes available for the operating system and applications.

Select the Size of the Partition to Create

Choose the partition type here. Creating a logical partition is recommended if you are not going to install an operating system on this partition. This partition type is recommended for data files.

Partition Type to Create

Choose the file system you want to use. I chose to use NTFS.

Select the File System

Then choose a drive letter for the new partition that the Acronis Disk Director will create.

Select a Drive Letter

Specify the new partition name here.

Name the new Partition

The next screenshot shows what the hard drive structure will look like when the Disk Director finishes the operation. The finish button will not start the job. You will have to commit to the changes first.

The Structure of the Hard Drive

So I smacked the Commit button.

Commit to the pending operations

The Acronis Disk Director then shows the pending operations that it will perform. The program is nice enough to warn me that a reboot is required so I will save this page and see what happens when I smack the Proceed button.

Acronis Disk Director is ready to proceed

The Disk Director tells me again that I need to reboot so naturally I smacked the reboot button.

Reboot the Computer

The reboot was quick. I saw a few screens showing me that it was analyzing and resizing the partitions then it booted without any problems. The following screenshot shows that there is now a perfectly healthy 100 gigabyte F Drive on the computer that wasn't there before.

The Created Partition

The Acronis Disk Director Suite also can perform many other hard drive operations as you can see from the following screenshot. Anything you can think of that you want to do with a hard drive is executable from the main interface of the suite. You can copy, move, resize, split, merge and even defragment your hard drive right from the Disk Director Suite!

Other Tools the Disk Director has to offer

The Acronis Disk Director performed the intended operations perfectly. For that reason, the Acronis Disk Director Suite gets a Brontobyte on a scale from Bytes to Brontobytes! The Disk Director is a highly recommended hard drive utility to have in your toolbox. Stop over to the Acronis website to see all of the other utilities they have to offer.

Acronis Disk Director Suite

The Acronis Disk Director Suite helps you manage your gigabytes of data fast and efficiently. Whether you need to upgrade your hard drive or dual boot your computer with different operating systems, the Disk Director is the tool to make any byte management task faster and easier than ever before. Check our reviews of the Disk Director to see this tool in action. Get 15% off Acronis Disk Director Suite by entering the following coupon code when you order: Coupon Code: NDJDD15 This is a limited time offer!