I have a serious problem with my hard drive.....i originally partitioned it to have tri boot windows 98/2000 and linux with a seperate partition for data, this all worked fine. I want to upgrade to Windows XP professional, erasing and merging the partitions with win 98 and 2000. However i can erase them but not merge them... i tried using partition magic which kept giving me errors and wouldnt complete the task, even fdisk wonmt load properly. I should add that my hard drive has been scan disked many times and no errors were found. I decided to format the two partitions and install Win XP on the c drive anyway whcich i have done, i then intended to install partition magic 7 and merge the c drive with the d drive....however when i try to install it i get the message that "an installation support file could not be installed Data Error(cyclic redundancy check) and the installation ceases. Can anyone please help me i really want to cure whatever problem there is with my hard disk and merge these two partitions....can anyone even suggest any other software that might help?

Do a google search for BootItNG. It is trialware, free for thirty days. You can use this to merge your partitions. Science is Cool!

Sounds like one of two thing happening here; either your install CD is dirty/bad or your CDROM is dirty/bad. In most cases one of these two thing has been the culpret for me. Cyclic Redundancy Check (CRC)is a very powerful but easily implemented technique to obtain data reliability. The CRC is one of the most used techniques for error detection in data communications. Cheers! kmd