Acronis International has announced the release of Acronis Disk Director 12, its popular all-in-one partition and drive management product.

There are no major changes this time, with Acronis concentrating on compatibility, for example ensuring that the new build now runs properly with Windows 8 and Windows 8.1.

Improved WinPE 4.0 and 5.0 support means you’re now able to use the latest version of Windows Assessment and Deployment Kit when creating bootable rescue media.

Select a volume and the sidebar lists the various tasks you can perform

In addition, both WinPE and Linux-based boot discs are now fully compatible with UEFI-based systems.

Disk Director’s core features remain as before. There are powerful tools for creating and working with basic, dynamic, spanned, striped and mirrored volumes; you’re able to resize, move, copy, split or merge volumes without losing any data; and there are tools to clone drives, recover lost and damaged partitions, view and edit volumes at the sector level, and more.

Acronis Disk Director 12 is available for $49.99 ($29.99 upgrade) for a single PC, $79.99 ($47.99 upgrade) for three PCs.

Acronis Disk Director 12 Advanced, the server-oriented business version, will apparently be released this summer. There’s no information on pricing or features yet.

If you’d like to take a look at the standard Disk Director then a demo version is available, but beware. It can only carry out a very few operations (MBR <> GPT and Basic <> Dynamic conversions, cloning of basic disks), and only on volumes of up to 100MB, so can only give you a very general idea of the program’s abilities.