I made the Partition Magic disk. I put it in and boot from it. It goes into DOS. I type in createbe. It starts the Partition Magic for BeOS but then it errors. I get the following errors:

Error 110
Partition table number of sectors is inconsistent

Error 116
Partition table Begin and Start inconsistent

This is how my hard drives are set up. I have a 60GB hard drive with a Active Primary NTFS partition of 8MB called C: (Boot). I have two logical non-active NTFS partitions on the same drive. Both about 30GB. One called D: (System) the other called E: (Temp). I have a 80GB hard drive which has a non-active primary NTFS partition. I have a 40GB drive that is not partitioned. I want to make a 5GB BeOS partition on the 40GB drive but I get these errors when loading the Partition Magic program.

You probably have overlapping or some other problem with your existing partitions. The problem partitions may be highlighted in red.

Did you create all of your partitions with Ranish?

Can you ignore the problems with the first disk and get to the second disk's tables? I think the code is F5 to switch disks.

-Bob

I made all my partitions with Partition Magic 8.0 in windows. They all check out fine according to the Windows partition magic, but not the dos one for BeOS. I will try switching discs with F5 and see if that works.

Scratch what I said about F5. That's a Ranish command to switch from one disk to the other.

You might consider switching to Ranish. I'm under the impression that Partition Magic is reliable, but you seem to be having some problems with it.

Ranish Partition Manager is absolutely reliable, and freeware. I run it from a bootable CD, although you can run it from within Windows or a floppy.

If you have empty space reserved for BeOS, instead of using Ranish or PM, you can create and format a BeOS partition with the BeOS tools.

Just some ideas. Hope it helps.
-Bob

I read two things, one is PM for beos and one is PM8.
If you used PM8.1 then you should be making great partitions. (unless a virus)

Then boot to your BeOS CD and install on your PM8.1 created partition. Don't use BeOS's boot loader unless your for sure double check that you made a copy of the boot sector. Some XP installs need some XP data in the boot sector. Darn windows again.

Ok. I have the partition made now, but I have a new problem. The drive that I made the partition on is RAID. BeOS does not recognize RAID when installing. I went to bebits and got the IDE driver and bootdisk. When I use the bootdisk the installation errors.

This is what happens:
After the bootdisk loads I press space to get into the options. Next I disable support for multiprocessors. Then I continue the boot. The progress bar (icons) complete. After the last one it sends me to the debug screen.

Yep, no beos raid controller drivers. It must be a drive that can be seen by common dos. It must be an IDE drive that is correctly seen by bios too.