PartitionMagic Says....

I'm a good boy, and I do what I'm told. So when Norton's PartitionMagic told me that my entire disk's file table (three partitions, one of which was and is Linux SUSE 10.2) was bad, I had a backup.

But why did Norton report that, and Disk Director not? In fact, DD was able to read the partiotns fine apparently, and the backups that I made (after the reading) worked and read fine.

Now, I KNOW that DD is a better product. That's why I bought it. But Norton does work, albeit not as well .

So what the heck happened here?

Regards,
Chuck Billow

 

Not a scientific answer, but based on supposition and conjecture. When Norton purchased Partition Magic from Powerquest (damn them for selling out), they really only did it so that PM would not compete with Ghost. They made one update to it, from 8.0 to 8.01 and that was about 4 or 5 years ago. Then they basically let it collect dust ever since then. It has had not had updates or bugfixes since then, whereas DD is currently updated.

I have run into this before. Your data isn't lost, PM for some reason just cant read the partition due to some glitch usually caused by using another partition manager on your hard drives.

PM just hasn't been tested against these other partition managers for years and they have changed, so conflicts are bound to happen.

PM still has features that are way better than most.

 

charincol:

I agree with most of your conjecture, but can add the following. PM has a tight set of consistency rules that it checks against and will flag even the slightest discrepancy as an error. My conjecture is that the PM rule checking is rather dated and meant to check for compatibility with all older versions of DOS and Windows.

Today you can create perfectly valid partition layouts with DiskDirector, or GParted, or Linux fdisk that work just fine with Windows XP and Linux yet PM will report that there are errors in the partition table.

 

Guys, that's what I had kinda thought... It's a little surprising, as XP is certainly no new kid on the block either, but then oh well...

Thnaks,
Chuck

 

But it scares the @#^% out of you the first time it happens and you think your partition table is corrupted.

 

Boy have you got THAT righ.

Especially since I had re-sized my partitions, and set up SUSE, and THEN this!

Well, my Acronis was up to date, and my life insurance paid, so I figured it would work out

CB

 

Yep; the first time I ran into this I also thought that there was some kind of problem. If you want to fix it so that PM is happy, here's how:

1. Back up your entire disk (all partitions) with TrueImage.

2. Boot from the PM DOS rescue disk (I made a bootable DOS USB stick to do this).

3. Destroy all partitions and re-create them with PM.

4. Boot from the TI rescue disk and restore each partition, one at a time, with TrueImage. Don't restore track 0 and mbr.

5. Have a Linux boot disk handy to reinstall GRUB after doing all this if you find that grub isn't working:

Code:

grub >
setup (hdx,y)

where x=disk number and y=partition number to reinstall grub to your Linux partition or

Code:

grub >
setup (hd0)

to install grub to the MBR.

6. If your Linux distro uses UUIDs, (like the current versions of Ubuntu), you'll probably have to fix this up in /etc/fstab and /boot/grub/menu.lst. Personally, I think the UUID system makes it more difficult to interpret so I replace all of the UUID entries with standard device notation (/dev/sda5, etc) for easier human interpretation.

7. If you changed the partition layout then you might also have to fix the Windows boot.ini file.

Steps 6 and 7 can be done using the rescue version of DD10 since it can edit NTFS and ext3 files directly in the rescue environment before attempting to boot into Windows or Linux.

Then PM will be happy (but a lot of work to get there). Or, you could just skip all this and let well enough alone. Everything will work properly except PM.

 

Mark, it seems that I've moved beyond PM...

Ironically, that is rtrhe one Norton product that I've kept around because it worked right! Seems the DD is more than able to cover the process though, and who needs two disk managers?

Besides, siince I'm (very slowly and with a lot of stumbles) starting into Linux (SUSE), DD being able to recognize all is a good thing.

Regards,
Chuck

 

I've had this problem also. I really think that something else is wrong. However I can't tell you what. If you can still get any of Paragons Partitioning products from VNU-net try Paragon. I bet you won't get any error. If you use Partition Table Doctor it might agree with Norton. If you correct forget the operateing system. If Acronis is working fine get rid of Partition Magic don't fix if its working.

 

It's been a while since I've played with Linux on the same machine as Windows (I use virtual machines these days) and I've not switched to Vista, so I still almost exclusivly use Partition Magic. I put in a 400GB HD into my machine and used Partition Magic to copy all 7 partitions from my other 2 HD's to it. The OS was moved from one Western Digital drive to the other (my new one) and it was flawless. So, don't discount PM because of this issue. It is still easier and simpler to use than any other partition manager IMHO.

 

PM isn't going anywhere yet... I too had used it exclusively for 5+ years, and I do a lot of fiddling...

But at least I kinda know what I'm looking at if it happens again...

Regards,
Chuck Billow