I really wouldn't recommend trusting any Acronis product for managing partitions. I had a big catastrophe today when I tried to use the Acronis HDD boot function (the one that offers to show a True Image screen on boot so you can run recovery right off the HDD).

It tried to create a partition, failed and abruptly exited. When I logged on to Windows all the partitions seemed to be in place but Windows prompted me to reboot coz "changes had been made". After reboot compmgmt showed me that a small partition (unlettered/ unused space) had indeed been created. A peep via partition magic showed the whole disk merged into one "bad" partition! I tried to allocate the unused space back via compmgmt and boom! it exits with an error and the free space has been merged with two of my logical data drives, making them both unusable. I know people don't think very much of PMagic but it was the only app that recognised that things had been badly fxxxed up.

I managed to get everything back, thanks to most of it being mirrored daily on another HDD and a gem of a utility called 'Find and Mount', free for home use. It lived up to its name and found both lost partitions and the chunk of unallocated space. It let me mount both partitions to their respective drive letters and I'm moving data to my other HDD as I type this. The free version lets you read data off the mounted drives at 512 KB/s, it'll take me half a day yet to get everything out of there but I'm not complaining, this thing saved my ass.

Partition Find and Mount - highly recommended! Acronis for partitioning, NOT!

One thing I'd like to add is, whatever tool you're using for partitioning, if it's not screwing up, stick to it! Managing partitions via multiple apps really seems like a bad idea.

• Can be run from Windows or booted directly from a Rescue CD if Windows won't boot
• Scans a drive to check partition table consistency
• If problems arise it finds all the old partition table data (even from a number of partition generations back) which can be really useful if your PT gets hosed
• BEST: It has a backup and restore function of the Partition Table data. This is really good - if the partition table is damaged you can instantly restore it - you just need to remember to get a new backup every time you make partition changes.