Got a tough one for ya, 1)Helping a friend install a new 160GB HDD on her system. Came with 133MB/s pci expansion card. 2)Got the new harddrive ready to go finally and was merging the 2 partitions on her original 40GB when it stalled. Friend rebooted w/o my permission. Reboot failed. 3)Hooked up the 40GB to my computer and tried to finish the job w/ Partition Magic 8.1. PM says: "DISK 3 (38170MB 4866c 255h 63s) appears to have partitions created using a different drive geometry (240h 63s). No partition manipulations should be made to this disk using this product or this operating system's products. Back up data, delete all partitions, create new partitions under the new drive geometry, restore the backup." So I clicked ok and the HDD graphic is rimmed in yellow and has the label "bad." I have a complete back up of the original boot drive (which is a plus) but: a) The compaq MB will not recognize the 160GB drive (partitioned into 4 - 40GB drives) w/o the expansion card. and b) I have to be IN windows ME to install the expansion card drivers according to the instructions. How do I: i) Recover the data, format, or finish the merging on the 40GB/ and ii) Install the drivers w/o being in windows ME?

Does the addon card have a BOOT option??

hello what program were you merging the partions with?if it was partion magic you need to use that and reinstall the hard drive in the computer you started the partion merging on. if the new drive has all the data on it you can slave it to you computer and copy the data off of it to cd,s.the hard drives on pci cards are not useallso bootable thats why x86 ask some are with a jumper of bios setting. if you cloned the oridgenal drive to the new 160 you could try takeing it off of the pci ide cable and set it as master on no.1 ide cable on mobo. removeing a hard drive that was partialy merged from one computer to anther would be why its not working diferant drivers hard ware acess rates ect.busses and such would be why you got the error.

wawadave, Was thinking to do exact same thing, but was making sure that I had some fellow techies behind me before I make the 10 mile drive to try it on the original system.