srog said:
Will be doing some large disk formatting and would like to use
Partition Magic boot disks for partitioning and formatting. On one of
the machines on a network the disks boot OK. On two others the program
hangs on the second diskette. I switched to MSDOS from Caldera without
any success.
1. Why do the diskettes boot on some machines?
2. Looking for faster ways to format than Fdisk.
TIA
Could be you are using an old version of Partition Magic. You didn't
mention which version you have. I still have the old version (8.01, I
think). You might try the Ranish PartitionManager. It's free. Never used
it but have heard about it several times.
Could be you are using Partition Magic illegally. The license says it can
be used only on *one* computer (i.e., it is a PERSONAL license). Do you
actually have the enterprise version? I've only owned the personal license
version so I'm not sure that Powerquest (when they existed) ever made an
enterprise version.
I've tried switching from Caldera to MS-DOS on the rescue diskettes but with
mixed results. Sometimes they worked, sometimes not, and it could fail on
the same host where they worked before. I checked the linking of the .bat
files on the two diskettes and found nothing broke. I even made the volume
label the same on the DOS-formatted diskettes that was used on the
PM-generated rescue diskettes. Didn't help. Had to resolve to using
Caldera DOS on their rescue diskettes.
FDISK doesn't do formatting. It only updates the partition table entries
with whatever choices you make. You have to follow with the FORMAT command.
Microsoft has their format tool to lay down their file system to group the
sectors, Linux has their utility, and I'm not sure anyone bothers with
trying to replace the OS-specific formatting tools.
