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I don’t dual boot. What do you mean by BCE? I don’t know what you mean by VISTABootPro either. This is XP – not Vista.
WillPittenger wrote:
I don't dual boot. What do you mean by BCE? I don't know what you mean by VISTABootPro either. This is XP -- not Vista.
Sorry if it was not as clear as it could be.
The dual boot was not necessarily relevant since the change may be in boot.ini which is in XP and in VISTA is named BCE (not BCD) Here's an explanation by Microsoft just in case you are interested:
What has changed?Windows Vista introduces a new boot loader architecture; a new firmware-independent boot configuration and storage system called Boot Configuration Data (BCD); and a new boot option editing tool, BCDEdit (BCDEdit.exe). These components are designed to load Windows more quickly and more securely.
The traditional Windows NT boot loader, Ntldr, is replaced by Windows Boot Manager (Bootmgr.exe) and a set of system-specific boot loaders. In the new configuration, Windows Boot Manager is generic and unaware of the specific requirements for each operating system, and each system-specific boot loader is optimized for the system that it loads.
VISTABootPro is a control for the BCE that VISTA uses so that you can change the way the system boots up.
Boil my message down to:
Installing SP3 on XP SP2 changed my bootup procedure; maybe it changed yours and that upset Partition Magic.
I hope one of the Norton Staff can give you some specifics on Partition Magic and your situation but it sounds to me that it is more related to something other than Partition Magic.
BTW Someone else here is having problems with reported drive size. 137GB is another limit that crops up. Again I think it is 48bit LBA related.
Sorry that the system has knocked out the URLs I put in my message to the two references to 48bit LBA.
Google will find references if you need more.
I use Partition Magic 8.0 with Windows XP Pro SP3 RC2 (I am holding off on the final SP3 version).
- Partition Magic's rescue disks insist my external Seagate (no additional brands like Seagate FreeAgent) 120 GB Mass Storage external drive is only ~500 MB. Because of that, I won't let that version of PM touch that drive.
- Partition Magic's install CD won't boot on this machine. I reach the point where I should see the splash, but get some sort of error code and end up dumped at a Y: DOS prompt. When I first got this version, that CD did boot.
- Partition Magic for Windows crashes all of Windows when I try to run it. Part of the problem is probably that Windows insists my internal PATA 250 GB drive (Seagate) is only 137 GB. Either my Promise Ultra ATA 100 TX2's bios or driveris out of date. I have updated the bios, but had to reinstall Windows since then. I don't see how the reinstall would affect bios, but... As for the driver, Windows insists the the current driver is more appropriate than the updated version.
- The Technical Support pages for PM 8.0 are a bad joke. They insist that 8.0 is out of date, but don't list any newer versions. (Is that a form of malware? From Symantec?
) They also list no other options than a FAQ search which quite readily lists FAQs for other products. Until these forums became available, there was effectively no support for PM.
I now have the 48-bit LBA problem fixed. I booted one of my BartPE disks. That allowed me to copy the driver to where Windows needed it. However, while Partition Magic now runs in Windows, it lists my external USB drive as a BAD partition. This is similar to the DOS version which simply says that the drive has too many cylinders to be supported by the BIOS. Under my previous Windows installation, PM 8 had no problems accessing and working with the partitons on that dirve. Why does it complain about it now?
Well, a reboot fixed the problem with the external. Now PM sees that properly. However, any time I attempt an operation on either drive, it ends up telling “the file system isn’t supported.” The partitions in question are all NTFS (XP version). Even deleting a partition triggers that message. So I think the problem has to do with the version of the partition table. Because PM wasn’t working, the partition table on both drives was started by my GParted LiveCD.
Will,
To clarify, are you receiving an error 507 "file system is not supported"? If that's the case, run Chkdsk /f on both partitions.
FWIW I have PM8.01 on my XP Pro system (it's dual booted with VISTA which I am in at the moment) and it has no problems with large internal or external drives both Seagate, Maxtor and WD.
I've just installed SP3 with no problems (I downloaded and burned the ISO version since I have more than one PC with XP on and I like to do updates from media. However I've not fired up PM in XP since I installed SP3 but I will tomorrow and report back.
Personally I would not hesitate to replace an RC with the released version, especially if I were having a problem.
What just might be relevant, since you refer to a failure to boot, is that installing SP3 wiped out by BCE (replaces Boot.ini on VISTA machines) and thus the ability to boot into VISTA. However it was easy to fix since I use VISTABootPro to control the BCEdit and reinstalling that brought the situation back to normal. But it does show that SP3 makes some changes that perhaps might affect your abiltiy to boot. You aren't dual booting are you?
I hope someone can help you resolve your problem -- I'd be inclined to consider updating the BIOS again even if you use the same version.