Partitioning a Hard Drive with Acronis Disk Director

Here is a review and tutorial 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.

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.

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.

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.

Select the Hard drive to partition.

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

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.

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.

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

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

Specify the new partition name here.

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.

So I smacked the Commit button.

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.

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

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 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!

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.

View the next tutorial on how to dual boot Windows Vista and XP.

Download a free trial of the Acronis Disk Director software so you can take it for a test drive.

Post your comments about the Acronis Disk Director

Comments	Date
By khalid	2008-07-09 09:42:43
i want please
By Randy	2008-04-08 08:42:32
I just went through the steps to resize a partition again and I come up with the same result as the tutorial. Double-check the steps you performed paying special attention to the picture, diskdirector5.jpg. You need to check the button to use the free space of the existing partitions. The default is to use the unallocated space. Let us know how it turns out for you. Thanks.
By withoutheart	2008-04-08 02:23:52
Failed to resize the system patation following your steps. The difference is I only have one disk. At the step which diskdirector8.jpg shows, it doesn't showns partation C's volume size, but only shows the unallocated space. Do you have any comment on this?

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