Partitionmagic woes

[samcol1995]

Having installed Partitionmagic some time ago with the intention of
having Windows 98 on my pc as well as XP, I gave up after failing
miserably to set it up properly. A couple of weeks ago I was bored and
started messing around with it again just to try and tidy things up. I
tried to merge the partition I had created originally which never
worked with the adjoining partition. All seemed to be going well with
the process until almost at the very end when an error code came up
(which of course I did not note down ). Now when I try to reboot,
it stops stubbornly after the initial dos screen and will not start XP.

Any ideas how to rectify this problem would be gratefully received.

 

[Rik Bean]

Having installed Partitionmagic some time ago with the intention of
having Windows 98 on my pc as well as XP, I gave up after failing
miserably to set it up properly. A couple of weeks ago I was bored and
started messing around with it again just to try and tidy things up. I
tried to merge the partition I had created originally which never
worked with the adjoining partition. All seemed to be going well with
the process until almost at the very end when an error code came up
(which of course I did not note down ). Now when I try to reboot,
it stops stubbornly after the initial dos screen and will not start XP.

Any ideas how to rectify this problem would be gratefully received.

What happens if you run PM again? It sounds as if your MBR may be
scrambled.

 

[John]

Having installed Partitionmagic some time ago with the intention of
having Windows 98 on my pc as well as XP, I gave up after failing
miserably to set it up properly. A couple of weeks ago I was bored and
started messing around with it again just to try and tidy things up. I
tried to merge the partition I had created originally which never
worked with the adjoining partition. All seemed to be going well with
the process until almost at the very end when an error code came up
(which of course I did not note down ). Now when I try to reboot,
it stops stubbornly after the initial dos screen and will not start XP.

Any ideas how to rectify this problem would be gratefully received.

I can't help you other than to say "never never move or modify the OS
partition while running under it" no matter what software you are using!
PM offers a DOS facility for doing major operations of this sort, the
Windows GUI portion of PM should only be used for things not involving
PM's OS partition. I have always said that PM should flatly refuse to do
what you did to its parent OS and should instead suggest using either
the CD, rescue floppies or another OS in a dual boot scenario to perform
the operation. Obviously even in that situation it should warn you that
all MS OS's boot strap files must be on a primary (the OS itself can be
elswhere) and that the boot strap primary needs to be the active partition.

The worst part of PM is its leniency, but the best part has always been
the documentation - educate yourself.

John

 

[Carl Dishman]

I've had a problem where fixmbr, fdisk, PM wouldn't touch it, couldn't
delete the partitions, I wound up using the floppy disk that came with
it to write zero's to the complete hard drive.
I don't know what my sister did to it (or virus) but of all the years
with computers that was the strangest thing I've seen.