Product Reviews

Yep, it's a hard disk management program. You can use it to split your hard disk into two or more separate partitions, which will show up as individual drives in My Computer. Even if you wipe all the data on one of those partitions, the contents of the others will remain untouched. More cleverly, the program can also merge two or more partitions without wiping data stored on them, in case you divide your drive and then want to turn it back into one. You can split partitions, copy partitions (or whole hard disks), and restore them later from the copies you made. You can even undelete partitions, although we had mixed success with this - it only really works if you

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haven't done anything with the space that the deleted partition used to occupy. You can also schedule regular backups of specific drives or partitions.

We have no complaints about that feature list, and the software does everything you would expect. It can even create a bootable sector on your drive containing the tools you need to recover your system using a previously saved copy of the disk, or to rescue a damaged partition. And even if you haven't used a disk management program before, you should be able to find your way around this software with no major problems. All the main features are clearly labelled and easy to find, you don't have to be a computer whiz to figure out what they do.

If it's so great, how come it doesn't get a prize? Well, for a start the new features in this version are a bit of a damp squib. You can now mount your archive so that it appears as a drive in My Computer; well, Norton Ghost and Acronis Disk Director, its main competitors, have been able to do this for a while. Other 'new' features include support for writeable DVDs, which have only been around for four or five years now. Oh, and Hard Disk Manager is more than twice the price of Acronis Disk Director, which you can get for £21 on Amazon.