magicianstalk said in
Hey all,
I just bought a new Compaq Presario R3140US. I installed Partion
Magic 8.0 on it so that i could partition off a 20 gig section of the
60 gig hard drive. However, when i tell the program to do it's thing,
it resets the compuater to take care of what it has to do, but during
the process i get a error #983 "too many errors". It seems no matter
ehat I try, i cannot partition a section of this HD. I have heard
that this is a common problem with trying to use Partiton Magic on
HP/Compaq laptops - but i haven't seen any solutions yet.
I heard one person say there is a small partition on all new compaqs
that hosue some OS files, and that it would prevent other partitions
from being able to be created.....is that the case? If so, what
shoudl I do?
Thanks a TON in advance for all of you help. You can email me at
(e-mail address removed)...
Thanks again,
Matt
"HP Pavilions that shipped with Windows XP do not include recovery discs
in the box. The recovery information is stored in a hidden space
(partition) on the hard drive. This eliminates the need for Recovery CDs
that can get lost or scratched."
(
http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bizsupport/TechSupport/Document.jsp?objectID=
bph07144). Yeah, cheap a-holes! In contrast, you can create backup
copies of the CDs to store offsite so you can perform recovery in case
of fire, theft, or from malcontents. I've also yet to suffer a CD
scratched sufficiently to prevent it from being used (guess it depends
on how abusive you are) but I have had hard drives fail. Supposedly you
can obtain recovery CDs from Compaq (now HP) but probably at some cost,
and I suspect these "recovery CDs" are merely disk images that don't do
an install but instead wipe out everything in the partition to lay down
the same image as when you bought the thing.
What partitions does PartitionMagic report? Does it say there is only
one lone 60GB partition occupying the entire hard disk? Even if a
hidden partition were used to keep a copy of the install files for the
OS, PartitionMagic should show that partition (any partition not listed
in the partition table won't be immune from getting its space reused
since it will appear to be unallocated space on the drive). If you've
gotten stuck with a Compaq that went this super cheap route of using a
hidden partition to consume your hard drive's space instead of just
giving you a CD which is pretty cheap in bulk, you'll need to find out
how to save it or use it other than in that hidden partition since that
is your ONLY copy of the OS from which to install or repair. I thought
Compaqs that used a hidden partition on the hard drive gave instructions
in their manual on how to create CDs to use instead. No? Compaq also
creates other partitions, like their System Partition just for utilities
(
http://h18000.www1.hp.com/products/servers/linux/compaq-howto-v8-2.html
).
Did you run 'chkdsk /r' (which will require a reboot) to ensure the file
system is okay and no bad sectors are found?
Did you create the PartitionMagic rescue diskettes and try booting using
those to run PartitionMagic? That prevents PartitionMagic from having
to use any portion of the operating system from the partition you are
trying to resize.
I think Powerquest uses Caldera DOS (DR-DOS) on their bootable floppies.
I have also found that sometimes Caldera DOS will cause problems when
running their DriveImage program, so you have to switch to using
MS-DOS/Windows9x to create a bootable floppy and move over their
config.sys, autoexec.bat, and other files from their first rescue
diskette to the MS-DOS/Windows9x bootable diskette, boot using that
modified diskette, and then use the second rescue diskette as-is. If
you don't have MS-DOS/Windows9X-ME to create a bootable floppy as a base
bootable floppy to modify, go to
http://www.bootdisk.com. I haven't yet
bothered to use the bootable floppy that users claim that Windows XP
will create when you format a floppy.
