The current version is 1.82b  On 2008-01-22, I determined it was last revised 2008-01-21.

It lets you have more than 4 primary bootable partitions if you use Boot-It exclusively for boot and partition management. It will back up the MBR. Boot-It will modify the MBR for each OS so that it gets to see the MBR in its preferred order with a partitions hidden it is not supposed to touch. This lets you shift partitions around without having to manually edit all the boot.ini files. It will also see the MBR as if it were originally the primary boot partition. It can also create images of partitions for backup. It is not a full blown backup, but it gives you the basic operation needed.

The competition is Acronis, a much slicker product, but which failed on my Vista machine. The venerable Partition Magic has not been updated to handle Vista.

Pros

• I chose it after experimenting with many to use myself both for partition and boot management.
• It is pedestrian, but solid. I find it fairly easy to understand what it is up to.
• It has a free trial. You get to prove to yourself it works before you spend any money, though you will of course spend considerable time.
• Works with Vista.
• You create a boot CD which will let you repair damage even when your machine is not bootable.
• You optionally can install it in its own partition where it won’t get clobbered. Before you can install Boot-It boot manager on your hard drive in its own partition, you must have a empty slot for it in the 4-slot MBR bootable primary partition table. If you don’t, you have to use the bootable CD to copy a partition to an extended slot to free up a primary slot.
• TeraByte did an excellent series of videos that explains boot.ini and its numbering scheme among other arcana. I got quite a kick out of watching the expert cheerfully editing partition table without any sign of terror or trepidation.
• It worked where others failed.
• If you buy it through this link, I get $8.74 USD .

Cons

• It will not resize Linux partitions. You must delete and recreate them, or use GPart under Linux.
• It will not format Linux partitions. You have to do it in Linux.
• It will not format NTFS partitions. You have to do in it W2K/XP/W2K3/Vista.
• It will not remember the names you assign partitions between runs.
• It cannot split partitions.
• It can’t grow a partition unless there is free space directly after the partition to receive the growth. You must get the rearranging effects you want with many primitive operations. You can’t copy or move a partition other than into free space. You can’t easily swap or reorder partitions. It won’t directly steal a little space from other partition to create new one. You must grow the extended partition and copy the partition into some free space there. You must get the net effect like a sliding square puzzle with atomic slide, shrink, grow, and copy steps.
• It will not directly convert a partition from primary to extended and back.
• You can’t queue partition moving operations up then run them unattended the way you can with GPart or Acronis. Rearranging disk partitions is a tedious process since each partition slide takes perhaps 15 minutes and you can’t do anything else on the machine while it copies. I think the copy operation works sector by sector without any buffering. It seems very slow.
• I have not yet figured out if it will let you boot to extended partitions while staying within the 4-primary partition limit. I have not managed to add Linux without grub to the list of bootables.
• The documentation and prompts presume you already know how partitioning works on a low level. You even must understand how to manually edit boot.ini when you change the number of partitions before the current one.
• It lets you edit the Vista BCD multiboot configuration using a low-level GUI (still daunting).
• It does not have an install program. You must unzip, then follow the complicated instructions in the 50-page bootitng.pdf file to create bootable floppies or CDs. It turns out that in the ordinary case all you need to is insert a blank CD and run makedisk.exe. It is included in the bundle, even though the manual says you must download it separately.
• It does not touch dynamic disks, Microsoft’s proprietary partitioning scheme.

Tips

• It insists on creating EMBRs, even if you don’t break the 4 slot limit. This is normal.
• Give your partitions temporary names by right clicking properties. It help you keep track of what you are doing.
• The question it asks “move data only?” refers to the fact it is rarely necessary to move the literal contents of empty space between files. It always moves the full mft and directory structure and hidden files.
• You need a fair chunk of free space to work. When you are done, you can shift the working free space just after some partition, the grow that partition to absorb it.
• You need to carefully map out your plan of attack in advance to avoid wasted time-consuming shuffling. Print out a map on paper of the planned order of your partitions and their sizes to guide you.
• Bad sectors are not properly handled. Modern drives have firmwar sector relocation. How and when is drive specific. You should use the drive manufacturer’s utility to scan the drive (it will typically relocate bad sectors without notification). You can can also use SpinRite. The general rule is once you start seeing bad sectors, the relocation table is full, and the OS software is handling bad sectors and it's time to get a new hard drive.

  When sliding/copying, the clusters marked bad continue to be marked bad but the clusters occupy different physical sectors. In other words, the actual bad sectors are no longer marked bad, but the old locations within the file system are. You can run chkdsk /r to do another surface scan or if you have Vista you can use /b to redetect bad clusters (to free the ones that are no longer bad). The net result is your data can be slid onto known bad sectors! If you have bad sectors detected by chkdsk, Boot-It becomes dangerous to use for sliding.