Active@ Partition Manager is a lightweight and entirely free tool that will help you take control of your drive's partitions.

The program can create, format, resize and delete partitions. Its own formatting options are restricted to the essentials only (FAT, EXFAT, NTFS), but it also recognises and can work with UFS, HFS+ and Ext2/ Ext3/ Ext4 partitions.

There are many ways to work with drives. You're able to set up new disks as MBR and GPT, or convert other drives between the two. You can assign partition attributes, change drive letters, mark partitions as active/ inactive, and more.

Some of this proved more powerful than we expected. A "View Boot Records" option displayed the full Primary and Copy Boot Sector, and a "Suggested Boot Sector", interpreting each field and making it possible to edit them.

There's also built-in S.M.A.R.T. support, giving you a basic view of your hard drive health.

The program allows you to roll back any partition operation, very good news if you make a mistake. We're not sure we would rely on that, but fortunately it's not necessary, as Partition Manager also includes a simple backup module to create and restore images of any drive.