This is more than a hard disk imaging program, though it'll image your disk. It's more than a disk partitioner, though it will create, delete and merge partitions. It includes a lot of other useful extras, too.

Hard Disk Manager 8.5 isn't just a tool for the hardware expert, as it provides a comprehensive set of disk management Wizards to give quick and easy access to most of the major tasks the program can handle. The main screen gives a lot of information on the structure of all the hard drives on your system, including external USB 2 or Firewire devices.

As well as being able to manage the partitions on a hard disk, Hard Disk Manager can copy the complete contents of a hard disk to another drive, either for security backup or when upgrading to a higher capacity device.

One interesting extra is a disk sector editor with a hexadecimal and ASCII display, which will bring warm, fuzzy feelings to the hearts of ageing geeks everywhere. If you need to get down and dirty in finding parts of deleted documents that are no longer recoverable through conventional undelete tools, this can be a very useful last resort.

The program can be run from within Windows or from the bootable CD you can prepare from the program. The CD version uses a cut-down operating system, to get at the disk structure without Windows. The program, like several of its contemporaries, uses a virtual mode, where any changes you make are stored up until you hit a separate Apply button. This gives you an extra level of security against inadvertently changing a disk.

We had an 80GB hard drive in our test machine which had been formatted to just short of full capacity, leaving 8MB of free space. This was too small to make a new partition, so we wanted to add the unformatted storage to the existing C: partition. We couldn't find any way to get Hard Drive Manager to do this, though running VCom's Partition Commander 8 had the task complete in a couple of minutes.

We also weren't happy with the report on Basic Hard Drive 0. The program reports the extended partition on this drive with 2047.9GB used, little short of amazing on an 80GB hard drive. Errors of this type don't help build confidence, which is particularly important in a product with the potential to wipe all the data on a drive.

The anomaly we encountered in capacity reporting may be a one-off and there's little doubt that Hard Disk Manager 8.5 is well-featured and designed to be easy to use. However, you'd probably be better off with a less all-singing, all-dancing utility which gets the basics right.