Can anybody help me with this please..... I set up my new computor 320Gb sata with 20Gb primary with the OS (NTFS), and did not allocate the rest as it was reported in "Disk Manager" as 117Gb. I adjusted the reg to enable LBA to get the rest 174+- and formatted the 117 to NTFS. Needing a spare drive I then partitioned 20Gigs of the balance of 174Gb and formatted in FAT32 because I wanted to store some FAT32 files recovered from my old drive (wrongly deleted) via "Getdataback". Now I get the message above.Guess it must think the new Fat32 20Gb primary partition is the boot partition.Did I do Bad? Help......

You can only natively have one Primary Partition,see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disk_p... Maybe it is time to use nLite and create a W2K CD with SP4 intregrated, this will overcome the hard drive size limit. Obviously you would need to start again from nothing.

Thanks WW I am on it!It is just hard to make a decision when you did so little and screwed so much up.I was suspicious when I designated the 20 gig partition "primary" it was based on the what I had read that you can have 4 primary partitions on any one HD. What I didn't appreciate is only one can be "active" at any one time.I am just amazed that windows does not warn you when you designate the second Primary as active that it will render yr machine unbootable. (In disk manager)Besides, what is the point of having an inactive primary partition? But then, maybe there is another use for that facility for experts only. Would "Partition majic" be able to remove the second active primary partition? (FAT32)

WebsWonder you can have 4 primary partitions per drive not one. All you have to do is make the correct primary partition active. You can do this from a bootdisk and the latest version of Fdisk. Or you can boot PM and use it to make the change. Imagine the power if you knew how to internet search