When will ADD Suite support GPT Disks?

Hello,
I posted on this issue well over a year ago, on this forum, but it seems nothing has changed.

I am using Acronic Disk Director Suite v10.0 Build 2160 on Windows Vista Business Edition SP1 (32bit OS). I have several of my external HDD, both Firewire and eSATA connected formated as GUID Partition Table Disks (GPT Disks). On starting up Acronis DDS it gives the following error message "W000101F9 - Detected unsupported hard disk drives". After clicking OK in this error dialog Acronis DDS starts up but shows the GPT Disks as greyed out and not available for managing by Acronis DDS.

When I posted on this issue before, I was told that a new version of Acronis DDS was going to be released which would support the GPT Disk format, and that I would be informed, by e-mail, when that happened. As I mentioned above that was well over a year ago now, and still Acronis hasn't released a new version, not even any maintainance builds, so far as I can see, let alone a completely new version!

The new GPT Disk Format was introduced with Windows Vista, which is now coming up to 2 years since it was released to manufacturing and to large busines customers, surely that is long enough to develop a new version of Acronis DDS that supports this new disk format.

While GPT Disks are not supported as boot disks in the 32bit version of Vista, they are the recomended format for booting the 64bit version of Vista, which is, by the way, becoming a lot more popular these days. I would have thought that Acronis wouldn't have left thing so long before updating their product to support this new format!

The length of time since the last update to Acronis DDS makes me start to wonder if it hasn't become 'Abandonware' software! Has Acronis abandoned further development on this product, and are loyal users going to be left in the lurch as and when GPT Disks become the 'norm' rather than the exception?

I moved over to using Acronis DDS when my previous favourite Disk Management Software, PartitionMagic was never updated to support the new Vista NTFS file system. Since that was taken over by Symantec it has never been updated and still doesn't recognise any partition formated by Windows Vista. Please, Please don't let Acronis DDS go the same way and become useless!

I look forward to hearing some positive news about the future of Acronis DDS.

Jonathan.

 

I am wondering about the status of Disk Director Suite too. I found this message thread because I also am looking for a boot manager that supports GPT disks.

The last Disk Director Suite update is dated March, 2007.
http://www.acronis.com/homecomputing/support/updates/

Does Acronis publish a Statement of Direction for its products?