I have 2 ide HDDs and everything works fine. I was thinking about changing a partition size using pqmagic (win) and when the program comes up I get this msg: disk 1(39205MB 4998c 255h 63s) appears to have partitions created using a different drive geometry (89h 6s). This serious problem can lead to data loss. No partition manipulations should be make to this disk using this product or the operating system:s products. You should back up the data on this disk, delete all partitions, create new partitions under the new drive geometry, and then restore your data using the backup. It is showing no partitions on disk1 (C and D drives. I have the system drive backed up with a Ghost Image and one using R-Drive. I have the data from the D drive saved elsewhere as well. Question- if I format and re-partition that disk will I have a problem restoring with Ghost (dos). Will the new geometry prevent the ghost of the current drive working correctly? I am not really sure what all this geometry stuff is or how it got created weirdly. I could just leave it alone as it all works fine except in PQMagic. thanks for any input.

This is usually a sign of a drive which was formatted under one controller was then moved to a different system and different controller. Is this the case? If not then odds are you using too old a version of the software that doesn't recognize the larger newer drives. 'tis the season to be of good cheer. Wishing one and all happy times with family and friends.

i did move the HHD from another pc but it was only 2 yrs old and ran of xp also. I am using ver 8.5 of pqmagic. main question thou is: can i format and redo the partitions with pqmagic and then put the ghost image of my system drive I made with the old geometry? does the geometry of a disk have anything to do with preventing a ghost image working. That is my only concern that it wouldnt work on the newly created partitions. any thoughts?

I have come across the problem of the illegal partition tables also. I've never used Ghost in this situation. I switch drives often. So I backup the long way to another clean drive. I reformat and repartition the offending drive with Partition Magic. I then install a DOS boot system and then copy the files back. This works upto Win98 with a FAT32 file system. I haven't tried it in XP or Vista yet. I do have a Vista laptop with the same problem but it has a SATA drive and no floppy. When I get an external SATA adapter I will try on it.