Acronis Disk Director v11 Home

This product caused me a lot of problems yesterday. While I have never made a review like this before, I felt like I should offer this cautionary tale:

I bought this product after receiving several emails the upgrade from my previous version of DD 1o, which would no longer run on my laptop. Tried the trial version first and it looked like it would do what I wanted. My laptop was partitioned by DD 10 in 2 and I wanted to give the OS a little more space as I had used up the 37GB I had initially allocated that partition. And, it worked! Next I installed it on my 2 Desktops. On both of them it caused my computer to not boot up correctly until I selected "Start from last known good configuration." Next I tried to merge a small unallocated bit of HD space into the Partition of my older PC, which required a reboot.
Thant is when things started to go terribly wrong.
I got an error message during the reboot that process 2 failed.
And, the system failed to boot after that. Just a message about "Verifying DMI Pool Data."
So, I took the drive out and tried to use the included "Recovery Expert" module from DD 11 loaded on my other PC to restore the old partition.
But, the Recovery Expert module would not load. If I tried run it directly, and not from within DD I got a snapapi.dll not found error.
I went to the website, found how to chat with tech support, and was on with Ankur very quickly.
And, put immediately on hold. While I was clear about the situation, his advice to me was far less than helpful. ""Recovery Expert is for recovering deleted partitions." He said after several minutes. Yes, that is why I want to use it I explained. Kinda thought that was obvious. Several minutes later he came back with this; "You do not need to verify the product, it should work." YES, I KNOW IT SHOULD WORK, BUT IT DOESN'T. (No alt caps when I explained this to him.
So, I tried uninstalling, with the intent to reinstall. Got an error there too.
Next, I ran the installer again and choose repair.
That did it! I was able to use the Recovery Expert!
And, it looked like it worked.
But my joy was short lived, since when I put the drive back in my older PC, I still could not boot. After several hours of trying this, updating my Bios settings, etc I got nowhere.
Eventually I had to give up and wipe the drive. Now that rig is out of commission. :-(
Sad especially since I had a lot of expensive software on there. Fortunately I didn't have any critical files.

In conclusion:
The older Disk Director Suite was not very stable, at least by my own use, and a number of reviewers here on Amazon that gave it one star and called it dangerous.
This product may be better, hard to tell from my limited experience.
I found the free chat support fast but useless, I had multiple issues with instillation on my PCs, and the product itself performed a resizing of the partition on my laptop successfully, but and when I tried a simple merge of a small file it ended up ruining the OS and destroying all the data on the disk. Was it worth $30.00 to upgrade? After spending 9 hours trying to fix the OS on my PC that this program destroyed.... in a word. NO!

If you are going to use Disk Director 11 Home:
MAKE A BACKUP OF ANYTHING YOU VALUE & USE WITH EXTREME CATION.

I bought Disk Director because I have been using Acronis True Image for the last 4+years and have found it to be a superior product. I fully expected Disk Director V. 11 to manage my hard drive partitions in Vista 64 Bit and Windows 7 64 Bit as well as Partition Magic did in Windows XP. Well to put it bluntly this is not the case. Disk Manager V. 11 is difficult to use and when I finally got it to re-size my C:\Partition it put cache areas of unallocated space before and after each of my partitions. When I tried to make a back up image of C:\ using Acronis True Image Home 2009 it would not work. Reinstalling Home Image fixed this. I made the back up Image but upon trying to start my PC the next morning I found it would not boot and I was unable to use Acronis True Image to restore the Boot (C:\)Partition. Luckily I reformatted my C:\ Partition and used a portable Hard Drive to restore the Boot Partition. Acronis Disk Manager does not mention this incompatibility in any of their documentation. I returned Disk Manager to Amazon and thanks to their return policy I got my money back. I will look elsewhere to manage my Vista and Windows 7 64 Bit partitions.

This product has nice packaging and slick interface. Unfortunately, I have only been able to getit to work properly on one of many attempts. Simple operations like resize or merge partitions either hang or toss me into my Visual Studio debugger. This program has proven to be a worthless time vampire. I have had similar results with True Image.

I've spent nearly $100 combined for zero value. How is this company still in business? (Suckers like me I guess)

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