A friend has a computer with one hard drive and it has been doing many strange things. After much investigating, we could not figure out what was wrong. Recently, we installed Partition Magic and when we tried to run it, it gave us the first real clue. A message popped up saying "Init failed: Error 100 Partition Table is Bad". Not happy to see this but it may explain what has been happening. Now, on to the question. His CDR writer has not been working for ages so he has no backups. He does have an extra 20 gig. IDE hard drive that we could put into the computer to save his data into when we repartition and reformat his present 60 gig drive. Can we put the second drive on the same IDE channel or should it go on the secondary channel for this operation? I am assuming that we are going to have to start from scratch again because I cannot find any way to repair his partition table or even to find out if it is really bad. Thanks

It doesn't matter as long as you plug it correctly.

I think I would do some more checking and not trust Partition Magic completely. Have you tried Fdisk to see what it says?

Hi DaveM, I have backed up to a second hard drive with it slaved on the Primary with it as A Master on the Secondary and as a Slave on the Secondary. For what you are doing it doesn't matter. HTH Good Luck! Mesich

I agree with jack. Try using fdisk to do a lookup (option 4) on the drive and see what it reports. Just make sure you're on the correct drive if there's more than one.