Partition Magic, Boot Magic, and a 1.5 TB SATA Hard Drive

Archive
1

Hello all,

 

Have used PM 7 and 8 for many years now, but now i have a new comp with a 1.5 TB SATA Hard Drive.

 

What i want is a 20 GB, FAT 32, XP Partition (for Boot Magic), followed by 3 approximately 470 GB, WIN XP, NTFS Partitions.

 

Now here are my problems:

 

1)  First of all, Boot Magic will not even run now, and the system will not boot.  I had to "start" to load another Op Sys, just so it would automatically disable Boot Magic.  Then i went in and removed Boot Magic.  After lots of different attempts to make it work, i resigned myself to the fact i may just have to use XP's Boot Manager...  :-(

           * Is Boot Magic not working because it is on a SATA Drive and not on an IDE Drive? (I have no IDE Drives on the system)

            I realize the comps may look for the IDE first, but i went as far as disabling all the IDE just so it would see the SATA first!  No joy.

 

2)  Secondly, although i was able to create the first big partition, nothing i can do will let me create the 2nd or 3rd big ones.  I can't even "copy" the first big one to create the 2nd and 3rd.

 

3)  I bet i could if i just used the PM 8.0 CD to boot the computer, then do it from in there, but, "woe is me", although the CD will boot, it will not run Partition Magic, nevermind Boot Magic.

 

Please, someone with a similar setup or knowledge respond!  I am guessing my issues are SATA and the size of the partitions, but maybe they're not.  Is what i am attempting just impossible with PM 8?  If it is, is there another alternative out there?

 

Help me Obi-Wan Kenobi....you're my only hope.....

 

Padawan

2

<< What i want is a 20 GB, FAT 32, XP Partition (for Boot Magic), >>

 

I hope that is a typo for maybe 20MB? I can't imagine why you should want 20GB for Boot Magic and I'm sure you can't create one that large in FAT32.

 

I doubt if PM 7 or 8 can handle such a large drive -- I don't think XP was handled until PM 8 was it? -- since they are relaatively recent.

 

Norton are not doing any further development on Partition Magic from what I've seen stated here so you probably need to go to some other utility which is more uptodate.

 

BTW If you are multibooting, Windows itself can set up a boot menu system and VISTABOOTPro (I have it installed on XP) provides a civilised GUI for it. However it does not hide the OS not in use.

3

Befuddled,

 

BM should work. SATA HDs are OK.

 

One big problem is the PM CD won't boot. Does the disk boot in other computers? Do other bootable CDs boot in your new computer?

 

If you can't get BM working you could copy pqboot32.exe into each WinXP partition. This would allow you to change OS from Windows and hide the other 2 partitions, but it is a primitive method. But you really need to get PM working from a boot disk so you can hide current OS while you are installing another.