I recently installed and old 2.5 Gig from my old computer, into my new one. It already has Win95 on it and still thinks that it is the primary HD. When I boot my system, it still boots with like it did before I installed the old HD. When in WinXP I can access the files on the old HD because it is stil a FAT partition and thus readable by XP. It currently has 2 partitions on it(One 1.5 Gigs the other, 500 megs). The problem is that I want to merge that two partitions on that drive and then change it into one Linux Ext2 and a Linux Swap partition. I have Partition Magic 8.0 and tried to use the "Format" function to change it to either an Ext2 or even a FAT32 I get "Error #4, argument/parameter." Also, even though the HD has 2 partitions on it, Partition Magic just labels the whole disk as "BAD." PowerQuest's site suggested using PTEDIT to fix it but PTEDIT.exe didn't seem to work on my comp. Does anyone know what's going on? Anything you could say would help.

First the explanation for BAD disk. Partition Magic is real picky on the setup of the hard drive. If the geometry reported by the BIOS and the geometry reported by reading the hard drive are different, Partition Magic either gives a message to fix the file allocation table and geometry or if it cannot fix it it marks the whole drive BAD so that it would not do any operation on it. It just happens that the same thing occured to me about 3 hours ago. I had attempted to preformat a larger drive to be installed into a system. The installed drive was properly recognized as I had set it up. However, when I ran Partition Magic to copy the original boot partition to the new hard drive I got the same BAD drive message. The cause is that different BIOS's interprets LBA drives differently. This was a problem with early big drive, so the only safe method was to set CHS manually not AUTO. In my case the drive was setup on a SOYO MB with AMI Bios and placed in a HP Pavillion 4540. I assume you problem came from your old system. To fix. I am assuming that you are clearing you old drive to install Linux. Go to DOS prompt. FDISK the old drive and delete all the partitions. Do a Cold Reboot. Partition Magic should now recognize the drive as empty. Partition as desired.

Thanks for the really quick response. It does sound like it should work, but when I go to "command" or "Command Prompt" in XP and type "fdisk" with any arg or even without one, it doesn't recognize fdisk as as a command "'FDISK' is not recognized as an iternal or external command, operable program or batch file." It begs the question of whether FDISK works with XP or not. Am I doing it wrong or something?

I don't use XP. There should be an equivalent command. If you can get a Win98 boot disk, you can use the fdisk from there.

THANKS ALOT MAN! I downloaded a Win98 boot disk, used fdisk to get rid of the partitions, converted the whole thing to FAT32 with XP's "Disk Management" and Partition Magic was then able to read it. clear sailing from here. Thanks again!