Partition Magic Gripes

 

XMNT2002 Program Not Found

April 23, 2007. After using Partition Magic 8, this message displays for a few seconds during the starutp of Windows XP. Windows does start and there are no lingering problems from this error.

Often Partition Magic 8 has to reboot to perform an operation. When it does, program XMNT2002 is the one that runs just before Windows to perform the partition related actions. If something gets screwed up then Windows tries to run this program at startup even though Partition Magic has no work to do. Thus, this error.

The fix is to tell Windows not to bother running program XMNT2002. Elsewhere on the web I've seen instructions for doing this by zapping the registry. Symantec also has a small downloadable program that will zap the registry. My preference though is to use Autoruns, a free program from Microsoft, formerly from Sysinternals (which Microsoft purchased).

As the name implies, Autoruns displays all the programs that automatically run at startup time. By simply unchecking a checkbox, Autoruns will prevent XMNT2002 from running. Go to the Boot Execute tab. It should be fairly obvious what to do.

Error 105   back to top

March 4, 2006. Someone I know has a laptop computer and purchased an extra 2.5 inch hard disk. The disk was connected with a special cable to the USB port and partition magic was used to copy partitions from the laptop to the external 2.5 hard disk. Partition Magic was also used to move and re-size the partitions on the extra hard disk. 

When the extra hard disk was put inside the laptop computer it wouldn't boot. Just hung at a black screen.

Running Partition Magic from floppies to look at the disk produced three errors before Partition Magic even started. The exact messages were not saved but in each case Partition Magic said it could fix the problem and was told to fix it. When Partition Magic finished starting up, it showed nothing but an error 105 on the partition table. It created the error.  

Knoppix, running from a CD, could see the hard disk just fine and display files in both partitions on the disk. The QTparted utility displayed the partition table just fine. 

Error 702   back to top

July 28, 2006. Burned by this again. As before, a new logical partition was being created in unallocated space. In this case an NTFS partition of 4.2GB. As before, the drive letter Partition Magic was told to assign was not the next one (E) but instead was one at the end of the alphabet. The fix below helped again. The partition was deleted and re-created just fine when it was assigned to the E disk. Again, Windows was used to change the drive letter. 

August 4, 2004. Partition Magic 8.01 (Build 1274 from 3/14/2003). Running under Windows 2000 using the GUI version of the product, not the floppy disk version. 

Once upon a time there was unallocated space in an extended partition. I tried to format this space as a logical partition using FAT32 but instead suffered an Error 702. There is nothing on the Symantec web site about an Error 702. Nowhere. Nohow. If you can sell the product without documenting the errors it generates, then why bother documenting the errors. 

I shut down Partition Magic and restarted it. The partition in question had recieved a drive letter, not the one I asked for it, and showed up as unformatted. I deleted the partition and tried again. 

This time I let it be assigned the default drive letter, the first time I told Partition Magic to use a higher letter in the alphabet. Also, this time I used a partition name that was short and only consisted of letters. The first time, there was an underscore in the partition name. It worked. 

I then used Windows to re-assign the drive letter to the one I wanted.

December 21, 2005. Partition Magic 8.01 running under Windows 2000 using the GUI version of the product. I was moving a logical partition a bit to the left and got Error #72. However, everything seems to have worked just fine. The partition got moved and has no errors. Even the Partinfo utility found no errors on the hard disk. However, the drive letter changed. It was a visible partition that was artificially assigned the letter X, and after having been moved now had the letter G, a normal assignment from Windows. 

Seek Error 46     back to top

September 7, 2007. While shrinking a primary NTFS partition, Partition Magic failed mid-stream (I didn't make a note of the error at the time). Before starting the shrinking, I had run a check for errors from within Partition Magic and the partition came up clean.

Afterwards, when I try to either get information about the partition or check it for errors, I get a Seek Error 46. Windows XP won't boot. It blue screens (BSOD) with an error 24 which is basically a broken NTFS file system. A couple disk image backup programs refused to copy the partiton or even copy the entire hard disk (which had two partitions) due to this problem. The Ultimate Boot CD for Windows could not even allocate the hard disk as the C disk.

I purchased a program that claims to fix partition table errors Diskpatch. After a long fight with it, I ran its repair function but to no avail, Windows would still not boot.

A google search on seek error #46 turned a few cases where people fixed the problem by running the Windows XP checkdisk with the /r option (for repair) from the Recovery Console after booting from a Windows CD. It worked for me too!. It took about an hour to run on a 60GB drive. During this time it displays a percentage of how far it's gotten. At one point, the percentage went backwards. This may be due to bad sectors in the middle of the partition, I'm not sure.

Error 1517   back to top

July 29, 2004. Partition Magic 8.01 (Build 1274 from 3/14/2003). From Windows, I told Partition Magic to copy an NTFS primary partition on hard disk number 1 to free space in an extended partition on hard disk number 2. It shut down Windows because the partition being copied was the one Windows was running in. The DOS mode copy suffered an error 1517 - Required file attribute missing. The partition was not copied.

I ran a Windows Check disk next but could not run a Partition Magic check for errors because the partition in question was the active one. So I booted using the Partition Magic rescue floppy disks and ran a check for errors from DOS. No errors were found. Then I tried the exact same partition copy using the rescue disks and halfway through there was another Error 1517. At this point Windows and Partition Magic have given the partition a clean bill of health. Yet, Partition Magic will not copy it. What a disgrace. 

I reported this to Symantec and they replied (on August 1, 2004): 

To me, the above response is baloney as the new partition is created from scratch into unallocated space. Judge for yourself. There is no way old errors could remain as the is no old data. There is nothing but a partition table that designates a section of the hard disk as not used at all - unallocated. It is impossible to turn CHKDSK /F on unallocated space. Symantec does not include the problem description from the user (me) in their responses so there is no way to see if the support person mis-read the problem description or the user did not explain it well. 

When I responded to Symantec that their response was sub-optimal, they responded with: 

No comment.

Curious as to just what an error 1517 was I went to the official Partition Magic 8 error messages web page where the error is not listed. I did find "Error 1517: Required file attribute missing (EA3905ED) which says that a CHKDSK will fix the problem. It did not. It also says that if there is an error found, run CHKDSK again and again until it comes up clean. Just for fun, I ran CHKDSK two more times in a row. Then I tried to copy the partition to unallocated space on the same hard disk. This worked. I give up.

Update January 20, 2009: A reader of this page wrote with the following suggestion about error 1517. I don't know this person, so take the advice at your own risk: "Partition Magic will give you an error 1517 if you try to copy a partition that contains a DIRECTORY named PAGEFILE.sys or hiberfil.sys in the root of that partition. Sometimes people put these directories there on purpose because they prevent windows from creating paging file or hibernation files on that partition. None of the official Partition Magic documentation, nor anything I googled contains this solution, and since I'm an unknown person, I point out that my solution is quick and easy to verify. Just delete or rename the directories in the root that have either of those special names."

Error 1516   back to top

Error 1516: Symantec says "The partition dirty flag is set in a restart record in the journal file" (from PartitionMagic™ 8.0 error messages and solutions). The fix is to run CHKDSK, but I couldn't because Windows would not run well enough. The Windows XP version of CHKDSK will not run in real DOS mode, only from a command prompt under Windows. I got Windows XP to boot to the Welcome screen showing the list of available users. Then I shut down without logging on as a user. This got rid of the 1516 error. I think the error stems from Windows not shutting down correctly.  June 18, 2004.

September 9, 2204. I got this again on a Windows XP computer that turned itself off (not blue screen, but off). Windows XP was then unable to boot, even into safe mode with command prompt, so as before, there was no way to run CHKDSK.

October 13, 2004. The web page I found earlier at Symantec about this error had disappeared, but a reader (Thanks Wed) found the new URL for it: Error 1516 Partition improperly dismounted

Error 1518   back to top

July 28, 2004. Partition Magic 8.00 (Build 1242 from 9/16/2002) ruined a partition while shrinking it.

I copied a logical NTFS partition from hard disk 1 to hard disk 2 in the same computer without incident. Then I shrunk the original copy on hard disk 1 and got an Error 1518 File Attribute Does not fit. The new size was larger than what Partition Magic had said was the minimum size, but not by much. 

Then I checked the troubled partition for errors and suffered an Error 7 Operation canceled by user and a critical error 46 Seek error. As Doctor McCoy used to say in the original Star Trek, "He's dead, Jim".  

I then ran an error check on the copy of the partition on hard disk 2. It was fine. There was no underlying file system problem with the partition originally. Indeed, Partition Magic checks for this sort of thing before it starts making changes. No, Partition Magic destroyed the partition while shrinking it. 

Curious as to just what an error 1518 was I went to the official Partition Magic 8 error messages web page where the error is not listed. Documentation? We don't need no stinking documentation.  :-(

March 20, 2005. A reader of this page commented that he recovered from an error 1518 that happened wile shrinking a partition. He followed the instructions for Error 1516, booted from the Windows XP install disc and used the Recovery Console to chkdsk. On the next boot, Partition Magic redid the resize operation and got it correct. I can't verify this.

April 12, 2005. A reader of this page commented that the following should fix any of the 15XX errors: 1) From a DOS prompt at the root of the drive with the problem, run "compact /u /s /i /q" (without quotes) 2) from a DOS prompt, run "Chkdsk /f". I can't verify this.
Update: August 18, 2006. Another reader confirmed that this works.

Error 110   back to top

November 14, 2005. Version 8.01 created this error when copying a partition. This time it was an internal hard disk, outside the computer connected with a special cable to a USB port. The hard disk had no partitions at all. Partition Magic copied the internal hard disk partition to the external one and the next time it ran, it complained about the Error 110 on the partition it had just created.  As before it offered to fix the problem and claimed it did fix it.

December 19, 2004. I purchased a new Seagate 40 GB external hard disk that was formatted as a single FAT32 partition. It seemed to be working fine at first, files could be added and removed. However, when it was connected to a computer running Partition Magic, an error 110 was issued as soon as Partition Magic started up. As with the gripe just below, Partition Magic said it was able to correct the problem, then said it did correct the problem and the error has gone away.

December 11, 2002. Partition Magic 6 started up fine. I used it to copy the partition containing the C disk to some free space on the same hard disk. This ran fine, but required a restart of Windows 2000 (SP3) as the copy has to run before Windows boots. After the copy completed, Partition Magic reboots Windows. I logged on and started Partition Magic again. It was not happy. As show here, it complained of error 110, which it had obviously just caused. I accepted the offer to fix the error and it seems to have worked. Shutting down Partition Magic and restarting it no longer produces the error 110.

Version 8 Gripes   back to top

Partitioning Plus Backup. From the January 2003 issue of PC World magazine. By Lincoln Spector. December 9, 2002. The new version 8 feature of resizing the clusters on an NTFS partition rendered rendered a Windows XP Professional computer unbootable. Besides, this bug, the author says the version 8 is not a compelling upgrade.  

I purchased Partition Magic 8 and before installing it wanted to know if my prior version (six) had to be un-installed before installing the new version 8. Prior to installing version 8 you can view an Acrobat version of the User Guide. It says nothing about this. Running through the installation process, the user is not told anything about this. 

Speaking of the installation process, the user is shown the readme.txt file after version 8 is installed. As usual, this file contains important information ("Known Issues") that you should know before installing the product.  However, it said nothing about un-installing older versions of the product. 

The quick start guide says installing v8 will not over-write previous versions. February 10, 2003. 

Version 8 supports external USB hard disks, but only when running under Windows. They are not supported when running under DOS, a condition the documentation refers to as "boot mode". 

PowerQuest Tries Out DRM In Partition Magic  The latest downloadable version of PowerQuest's PartitionMagic software contains product activation technology backed by digital-rights-management software, company executives acknowledged Friday.  ExtremeTech June 20, 2003.   

Fred Langa on Drive Image 7 and Partition Magic 8 from the June 23rd issue of his newsletter: " DO NOT buy the new Drive Image and Partition Magic, as they currently exist. What disappointments! It really looks like PowerQuest peaked some time ago; the new versions are a real letdown: PM8 is a weak upgrade at best, and DI7 feels to me more like a late beta than a shippable product. My experience with their tech support also was less than stellar, taking a week to resolve what should have been a simple problem. Sigh." 

Fred Langa expanded on the above in the July 3, 2003 issue of his newsletter. 

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September 19, 2003. There is an upgrade from version 8.00 to 8.01 available on PowerQuest's web site. However, they don't explain the bug(s) that the update fixes.
Update: April 3, 2004. This link no longer works, now that Symantec purchased PowerQuest. This Symantec web site page seems to have every PowerQuest KB article in one very large page. They didn't even bother separating them out by product. I did manage to find the PartitionMagic 8.0 Master Support Page.

Update. July 28, 2004. These links no longer work.
    Download the 11.5MB patch to get from v8.00 to v8.01. (no longer works as of April 2006) 
    Download the manuals for version 8 as PDF documents (still valid as of April 2006)

Update: May 2, 2006.
  FTP access to Partition Magic 8 patches and updates 
  ftp://ftp.symantec.com/public/english_us_canada/products/pmagic/pmagic_8/updates/  three patches 
  ftp://ftp.symantec.com/public/english_us_canada/products/pmagic/pmagic_8/updates/pm801_patch.zip  the 11.5MB patch to get to 8.01 
I read somewhere online (but have not tested myself) that the enpm801_h1.zip file is not password protected but the enpm802_h1.zip file is - the password is pm1513. Instructions are in the enpm802_h1.zip file. Below are where the files go;
  Xmnt2002.exe - \windows\system32
  PMagic9x.exe and PMagicNT.exe - PM Install Dir
  PqMagic.ovl - PM Install Dir\Dos

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Someone running PowerQuest v8 asked me about an error 1556. The old URL for their master error list no longer works. Then I found it at a new location in January 2004. Then it moved again. I searched the Partition Magic KB for error 1556 and it returned nothing. It's there, the search just couldn't find it. I eventually did, but it wasn't easy. PartitionMagic™ 8.0 error messages and solutions. However, it does not have an entry for a 1556 error. Further searching turned up this: Error 1556 reported when using PartitionMagic's "Redistribute Freespace" Wizard on an NTFS partition. The solution requires owners of version 8 to download a patch for version 7.01 and then convert the partition from NTFS to FAT. 
Originally: January 12, 2004. Update June 18, 2004. 

Partition Magic 8.01 seems to have broken a partition of mine. I wanted to move it from one section of the hard disk to another section of the hard disk and this required converting it from a primary to a logical partition, then copying the logical partition and then converting it back to a primary partition. I did each of these steps one at a time. The new copy of the partition no longer boots. It is a Windows XP system partition and I can only boot it using a boot floppy disk that has boot.ini on the floppy disk. WinXP will not boot from the hard disk, even after moving the same boot.ini file to the hard disk. March 28, 2004. 

After reading this web page someone emailed me their gripe with Partition Magic 8. I have no way of verifying this. They said: 
"I upgraded to Partition Magic 8 and today tried to use it to merge two partitions on my new notebook's hard disk. Everything seemed to go as planned, but after rebooting, not only weren't the two partitions merged, the data was gone from the partition I had wanted to merge into the other. When PM8 merges two partitions, it asks you to name a folder on the merge-into partition into which it will deposit all the files from the merge-from partition. I did this. PM8 did make this folder, but it didn't deposit any data into it. So, in effect it erased my data from the merge-from partition and didn't copy/move it to the merge-into
partition".  April 3, 2004. 
Update: This was confirmed by another reader of this page. April 11, 2005. 

I copied a primary NTFS partition to a primary NTFS partition. Then I resized the copy. Then I went to move it and got an Error 1655, FRS not in any directory. File 13796-13796. Beats me. I deleted the partition and ran the same operations again without incident. June 30, 2004. 

What is the latest version of version 8? Should be a simple question to answer, but its not. When you go to Symantec Support there is a list of all their products. This list has an entry for Partition Magic and another entry for Norton Partition Magic. Why two? After you select a product, you select a version. For Norton Partition Magic the available versions are "8.x" and "Partition Magic 8.0". Seem the same to me. For Partition Magic the available versions that you can request tech support for are "8.0" and "Norton Partition Magic 8.0" and "other versions". They just don't care. Not at all. I was checking because someone wrote me that the latest version was 8.0.5. The latest version on Symantec's web site is 8.01. Which is newer? Beats me. December 22, 2004. 
Update: A reader of this page commented that there is a version 8.02. How pitiful is it that determining the latest release of a software product should be impossible from the vendors web site. December 28, 2004. 

Question aboutWRPROG   back to top

February 6, 2002. This is not a gripe about Partition Magic per se, more so, it's about technical support from PowerQuest. 

Partition Magic v6 comes with another PowerQuest program called BootMagic which lets you boot multiple operating systems on a single computer. I have been afraid to use it because it installs itself in the most critical areas of the hard disk such as the Master Boot Record. If anything goes wrong, it can render a computer into a paperweight.

It did some research on BootMagic on the PowerQuest web site and ran across a supplemental utility called WRPROG.EXE. Quoting from the instructions for using it on their web site: 

If I can run this program before installing BootMagic, I would feel safer. I wouldn't mind running it even without installing BootMagic. However, there are some problems with the online instructions. 

First, there is no date on it. One example is from version 5 of Partition Magic,  which is now, two versions old. 

The program needs to be run from true DOS. It can back up the first track of your hard disk to a file. However, the instructions do not say what file systems it can write to or read from. That is, can it read/write to FAT32 or NTFS? Also, it does not say if the output backup file can be on the floppy disk or if it has to be on the hard disk. Will the backup even fit on a floppy disk? 

I asked PowerQuest these questions on this web page on February 6, 200 and never got an answer. 

March 16, 2002.   I asked the same questions again. You can not ask a question about BootMagic, so I submitted it as a question about Partition Magic Pro 6.0x. You can also not ask questions about Partition Magic v6 (the non-Pro version) which is the version I own. I tried nonetheless since it's a question, not a problem and is about their documentation on BootMagic.

March 18, 2002. I get a reply, but it didn't answer my questions. Not even close. If you can discern the question or problem the technician thinks he answered, please fill me in. I gave up. 

My exact question:

The reply:

An argument can be made that the Master Boot Record (MBR) is the most important part of your computer. Any problem with it renders your computer unusable. It contains a small program necessary for the computer to boot. This program runs before Windows. It starts the Windows boot process. The MBR also defines the boundaries of the partitions on the hard disk - vital information. On top of this, it is a single point of failure. Use your  judgment as to whether you trust the care and feeding of the MBR to an company that answers a question about backing it up this way. 

External USB Hard Disk   back to top

April 4, 2002. I purchased a Maxtor 40 gig external USB hard disk. It is marketed as a USB 2.0 device but also plugs into older USB 1.0 ports. 

I used it with a USB 1.0 port and wanted to know about whether Partition Magic v6 supported external USB hard disks. Both the readme file and the User Guide said nothing about external USB disk drives. The PowerQuest web site says that to use Partition Magic with an external USB hard disk requires version 7. This is not true. I used version 6.0 Build 242 from 10/10/2000 on a Windows 2000 SP2 computer and it worked just fine. 

A page on the web site describing new features in version 7 says "External USB drives can now be seen and accessed by Partition Magic (Windows Only)". Version 6 not only sees such drives it manipulates them. Another page says "versions prior to Partition Magic 7.0 do not support PCMCIA or USB devices at all". 

I used version 6 to shrink a FAT32 partition on the USB hard disk without problem. One time the shrinking did not change the FAT32 cluster size and another time it did. Both went well.  Version 6 was also able to convert from FAT32 to NTFS and to create a new NTFS partition on the external USB hard disk. In addition it deleted partitions on the USB hard disk and copied a partition from the internal hard disk to the external hard disk without incident.

The gripe here seemed to be only with the documentation, not the software. Perhaps it was an oversight. Then again, could it be that they downplayed the capabilities of version 6 in an effort to sell version 7?

April 5, 2002:  I thought my gripes were limited to the documentation until I tried to rename a partition on the external USB hard disk. As shown here on the right, this failed with Error number 1. There is no explanation of the error, just a number.

The Partition Magic display however, showed the partition with the new name, not the old one. This turned out to be yet another error. After shutting down Partition Magic and restarting it, the partition showed up with the old name.

For good luck, I checked the partition for errors and it came up clean.

So what is error number 1? The User Guide has a list of some Partition Magic errors, but it did not include error number one. The PowerQuest web site also has a list of errors. There are three different error ones: Partition table invalid,  Batch file could not be created, and Not Supported. Which of these three different error ones was my problem? Considering there was no text in the error message box, there is no way to know.

Later I tried to rename the partition again. It worked fine. You get the impression that after six versions, Partition Magic is still an unfinished product.

May 25, 2003. Version 8 of Partition Magic supports external USB hard disks, but only when running under Windows. They are not supported when running under DOS, a condition the documentation refers to as "boot mode".

Modifying Boot.ini File     back to top

April 23, 2002. Partition Magic version 6.0 Build 242 from October 10, 2000. Windows 2000 SP2.

Partition Magic modifies the boot.ini file, a critical file for Windows 2000. This is a gripe in and of itself. The potential problem with this is that it can render Windows 2000 unbootable. To make matters worse, it modifies the file in the worst possible way.

• The user is not told this is happening 
• The file is not backed up before being changed 
• It changes and deletes data in the file 

In addition, the modifications sometimes make no sense. I have often seen a boot time choice of "Partition Copied From Disk 0". Gee, thanks Partition Magic, that makes a whole lot of sense. And these messages result from partition copies that worked fine, there was no mid-stream interruption to explain these strange messages/options. 

In one case, the hard disk had three primary partitions and an extended partition. Windows 2000 was running from one of the primary partitions, the other two were hidden. Partition Magic 6 was run under Windows 2000 and used to delete one of the hidden primary partitions. In doing so, it modified the boot.ini file on the C disk of Windows 2000. The partition number for the active Windows 2000 was changed from 3 to 2. An entry for partition number 2 was deleted. 

In fairness, there is a reason for these boot.ini modifications as illustrated when I created a new partition in the unallocated space where the old partition had been. The partition number for Windows 2000 was changed from 2 to 3. The entry for partition number 1 was changed to partition 2. These changes insure that the partitions can be booted correctly following the changes made by Partition Magic. Nonetheless, before running Partition Magic it would be a good idea to make your own backup of boot.ini.

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July 12, 2003. Version 8. Another issue surrounding the modification of boot.ini: a hidden partition is not very hidden. 
I copied a visible bootable primary Windows 2000 partition to a hidden logical partition on the same hard disk. In doing this, PM modified the boot.ini file in the source (primary) partition and added an entry for the hidden logical partition (which was intended as a backup - I do this before applying service packs). You can select the hidden logical partition when booting the primary partition and the logical partition boots and runs fine. It sees the visible primary partition as another drive letter. Running PM from the hidden logical partition shows that it is still hidden.  Not very hidden.

Error 10002 at Startup     back to top

Installing Version 6   back to top

January 2001

Windows 2000: I opted for a custom install rather than a typical one. In the Select Components window the space required to install Partition Magic was 31,929K. I clicked the NEXT button to go to the Confirm Choices window. From there, I went back to the Select Components via the BACK button. Now it says that the it needs 27,550K to install the product. It ended up using 27 MB. The partition in question was NTFS. January 2001. 

Windows 98 SE: I opted for a custom install again, not to change any of the options, but just to see what they are. In the Select Components window it said that it needed 30,993K of disk space. Clicking the NEXT button takes you to the Confirm Choices window. From there, selecting the BACK button to return to the Select Components window, and it now says that only 26,615K of disk space is required. The partition in question was FAT32.

A side effect of installing Partition Magic 6 under Windows 98 SE is that it pops up as a choice when you right click on the START button. 

Expanding a FAT Partition  back to top

January 5, 2001.  I could not resize a FAT partition to enlarge it. This is a supported operation for Partition Magic and one that it has done for many releases. The partition type was FAT16B (06 in hex) and it had 16K clusters. It was a logical partition and was followed by 546 MB of free space in the extended partition. The partition size was 1,011.9 MB and there were 46.5MB of free space in the partition. It actually would have let me enlarge the partition, but only by 8MB to a maximum size of 1,019.7 MB. It would not let me change the cluster size. When asked to check for errors in the partition, it got a clean bill of health from Partition Magic. There were no error messages in using Partition Magic at all. Partition Magic was version 6.0 from October 10, 2000. 

I did not report this to PowerQuest for a while, as the Error 1532 described above was more important to me. About 10 days later, the partition was able to be resized. What gives? 

I suspect the problem was freespace. When the partition could be resized and enlarged, it had 787 MB of free space. When it could not there were only 46.5 MB of freespace. This makes sense and is reasonable. The gripe however, is that Partition Magic, despite being in its 6th version, still does not inform the user that this has occurred. I was ready to report it as a bug to PowerQuest. 

Bootable Partition on Second Hard Disk    back to top

December 19, 2001. Partition Magic version 6 running from DOS rescue discs (v6.0 Build 242 10-10-2000). On a computer with two hard disks and a bootable (active in Partition Magic lingo) partition on the first hard disk, that partition will be used at boot time to load an operating system. No matter you do on the second hard disk in terms of changing which partitions are defined as bootable is irrelevant. Nonetheless, if you change the bootable partition on the second hard disk, Partition Magic immediately requires you to reboot the computer. 

Bug Copying Logical Partition    back to top

December 19, 2001. Partition Magic version 6 running from DOS rescue discs (v6.0 Build 242 10-10-2000). I copied a logical FAT partition from one hard disk to another hard disk in the same computer. There was a pop-up window initially that said "Analyzing...please wait". This window never went away. Even after the analyzing finished and the copying started, the window was displayed and it covered up the progress bars so you can't see them. The window has no title bar so it can't be moved with the mouse. 

When the partition copy ended, the window was still displayed, covering up part of the message that says "All operations completed". At this point, the user is supposed to click on an OK button. However, the pop-up window was still displayed and still had focus making it impossible to click on the OK button. I had to re-boot the computer. The partition copy operation had worked fine.

Problem Resizing a Partition     back to top

December 21, 2001. Someone I know recently got a new computer with a 40 gig hard disk. The machine was configured as a single FAT32 partition. When Partition Magic v6 was used on this machine to make the partition smaller, it failed with Error 3 Not enough memory. The same error occurred while checking the partition for errors and also while just getting information about the partition. 

The first solution offered by PowerQuest is to upgrade to the latest version of Partition Magic. Which version? It does not say. The "latest" version changes every 10 months or so (as of this writing v7 is the latest). There is no date on the solution, so you can't even guess what the latest version was at the time the solution was written. 

Two other solutions discuss creating a DOS boot disk. Windows 2000 can not do this (the machine in question was running Windows 2000). Specifically, PowerQuest says to create a DOS boot diskette from the C: prompt by typing "FORMAT A: /S". The "/S" parameter does not exist in the Windows 2000 version of the FORMAT command. 

In fairness, PowerQuest does offer quite a few suggestions for dealing with this error. I was not there to try any of the suggested solutions. 

Tech Support Web Site Broken     back to top

January 9, 2001. Twice today I tried to use the support section of the PowerQuest web site and it failed to load completely (note that the link here is the redirected page, not the original URL which is the link above). Fortunately, enough of it loaded to bring up the Contact Us link. On the Contact Us page it says:  

This is not true. The email link above is really a link to a web page where you report your problem. 

FYI: In the last week, they added an option to report a problem with Partition Magic v6.  

I asked whether this error prevents the partition from being enlarged. I don't know if my submission went through however. The resultant web page (after clicking on the submit button) was blank!  I shut down my browser, started it up again and re-entered my problem description. Again, the resulting web page was blank. Ugh. 

January 30, 2001. No response to the above two problems entered 21 days ago. The problems with their web site must have prevented entering of the problem.

Error 1532 Too Many Clusters    back to top

January 2, 2001.  I was resizing and shrinking an NTFS partition with NT4 workstation in it today and the resizing process was mostly done. Then Partition Magic displayed "Error 1532 Too Many Clusters" which turns out to be an NTFS check error. After the resize, the partition was 1,043 meg of which 71 meg was free.

I try to look up the error in the Partition Magic v6 User Guide (Edition 1, dated October 2000) that is on the product CD-ROM. Its not there. 

The User Guide says to check the PowerQuest (vendor) web site at www.powerquest.com/support/ER/er-0000.html  for a list of all Partition Magic errors. I do so, but the web page is not found. (re-verified December 2001 and May 2002. It still does not exist). 

I search the PowerQuest web site and by accident stumble across the web page mentioned in the User Guide. Turns out the User Guide has a typo and is missing one letter from the long URL.  

This web page however is useless. It is a master list of every error that Partition Magic produces. For each error, there is no additional information. Just the error number and message text.

There was no information anywhere on the PowerQuest web site about this error. 

As part of my searching the PowerQuest web site, I clicked on the support link on the main page. It's broken. The page can not be displayed due to an HTTP 500 Internal Server Error. The page is support.powerquest.com. 

The problem is important enough to me to call PowerQuest on the phone. However, January 2nd is a holiday for them and they are closed. Telephone support would be $95.  

Instead, I filled out a problem report on their web site. There is no option on the web page where you enter your problem details to indicate that this problem relates to Partition Magic v6.  The product has been on the market for at least two months and they have not updated their web site. They did however recently answer a question about version 6 that I submitted, even though I had to say it was for version 5.   

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January 3, 2001.  I called PowerQuest on the phone. The tech support person said this error has been reported many times. 

This error is a sanity check error (the tech details were a bit over my head) that PowerQuest checks for but Windows NT4 does not. This was great news as it meant that the partition was bootable and usable by NT4 and indeed it was. PowerQuest said that an NT4 check of the partition (chkdisk) would find no errors and this later turned out to be true. 

The big gripe here is why doesn't Partition Magic test for this condition before it starts to resize the partition. The product does do sanity checks both before and after resizing a partition, but the check for this condition is apparently only made after the resize operation. 

The tech support person seemed (justifiably) annoyed about it. Not annoyed with me, but the Partition Magic programmers. The only way to get rid of this error that tech support could offer was to delete the partition and re-install NT4. 

I was so glad to hear that the computer was still usable that I forgot to ask some follow-up questions: 
--Would converting the partition to FAT eliminate the error? 
--With the error, can I again resize the partition? 

The last point is particularly relevant since the resize that caused the failure was a shrinking of the partition and I will later need to enlarge it. The first point may not be an issue because Partition Magic 6 only offers to convert this NTFS partition to FAT32 which is not usable with Windows NT4. I think this has to do with the fact that Partition Magic is running off rescue floppy disks, but I'm not sure. 

Another problem this caused is that the partition no longer passes file system checks so Drive Image, another PowerQuest product, will not back it up. In Drive Image version 4 however there is an option to bypass the file system checks. 

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I had reported this problem to PowerQuest January 2, 2001 using the Technical Support section of their web site. However, I couldn't wait for an answer so I called them on January 3 as noted above. On January 10, 2001 they replied to the web site report of this problem with the below message:   

There is much wrong with this response. Partition Magic does not assume things are well before working on a partition, it runs sanity checks. The situation I described to PowerQuest was one in which Partition Magic stopped in the middle of resizing a partition. It did not, as the response above suggested it would, shut down rather than manipulate a partition was potentially incorrect information on it. I made this clear in the problem description.

Finally, the person I spoke to on the phone said that there is no work around for this problem. Who to believe? I tested it by running a chkdsk /f on the NTFS partition in question and then re-running Partition Magic and checking for errors. It still reports the Error 1532.  

When I responded to PowerQuest that chkdsk did not fix the problem, they replied quickly (on Jan 16, 2001) with the below. 

I ran chkdsk /f /r three times. It did not help. Partition Magic still reported the Error 1532 when it checked the partition. 

The /IFC switch did not work either.

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December 19, 2001. The error 1532 also comes up while getting information on the NTFS partition. As expected it's also displayed when checking the partition for errors. 

I found a master error list for PowerQuest products that includes an entry for my error, 1532. It says to: "Run CHKDSK /F on the affected drive." That's it. Nothing about the /IFC switch and nothing about trying to add the /r switch to the CHKDSK command. Maybe, by now, they realize these things are ineffective. They didn't work for me. 

If CHKDSK does not fix the problem, it says: "...you must back up the data in the affected partition, delete the partition, re-create it, and restore your data." Let me paraphrase: tough luck.  

This is all Partition Magic's fault. Windows NT4 is very happy to use this partition and not complain. The chkdsk command finds nothing wrong. Yet Partition Magic reports errors and won't resize the partition.  

The technical explanation from PowerQuest about this issue on their web site is: 

I never ran SysPrep and don't even know what it is. 

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December 20, 2001. A second hard disk was added to the computer, connected to a new EIDE controller on a PCI card. Specifically, it was a Maxtor Ultra ATA 100 controller card and the second hard disk was the primary master on it. I tried copying the partition in question from the old hard disk to the new one using Partition Magic v6 from the DOS rescue disks (v6.0 Build 242 10-10-2000). The copy operation started, but failed mid-stream because of the Error 1532. The failed partition copy left he new hard disk corrupted. Not just the half copied partition on the new hard disk, all partitions were inaccessible. Re-booting from the DOS rescue disks, the second hard disk was in such bad shape that Partition Magic would not even start up. It just hung with an hourglass mouse pointer and a blank screen. I had to use the MaxBlast software that came with the Maxtor hard disk to re-initialize the new hard disk. Everything on it was lost. 

Here too major blame falls to Partition Magic. If the partition has errors that prevent its being copied, why are these errors not detected until the copy operation is already underway? Also, why does a failed copy operation render the target hard disk useless?  

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Drive Image and this partition: This page is for Partition Magic gripes, but this somewhat broken partition also effected Drive Image and I don't as yet have separate Drive Image gripes. 

December 26, 2001. Because of the Error 1532 Too Many Clusters on my NTFS partition Drive Image version 2 and 4 would not back it up. However, they both have an option to bypass file system checks and with both versions of Drive Image this option allowed it backup the partition. Fine. 

Drive Image version 2 (which I own) does not have an option to bypass file system checks during a restore. Drive Image version 4 does have this option, but I only have a demo version of it and the demo version does not restore anything. No big deal, I'd buy the latest version of Drive Image if I knew that it could restore this partition. 

The PowerQuest web site does not allow for questions about their products. I had to use a web page for entering tech support problems to ask my question. The first time I used this web page, my submission failed because it requires a PartInfo file. PartInfo is a utility that dumps out information about the partitions on your hard disk. For a real tech support question it might be useful. For a question, it's irrelevant. Nonetheless, the web page requires a file on your computer be uploaded to enter a problem. This, of course, is not made clear. For good luck, I also emailed my question to magic@powerquest.com  

After explaining the situation, I asked PowerQuest two specific questions: 
1. Does Drive Image 5 still have an option to bypass file system checks on a restore? 
2. Will this option, if it exists, let me restore an NTFS partition with an Error 1532? 

January 3, 2002:  I got two responses from PowerQuest to the above questions. The first response was from Jason who said the Drive Image 5 would not work. He did not go into detail (a vague reply to two very specific questions) but was apologetic. The second reply, from Dennis, said that Drive Image 5 does have an option to bypass file system checks. However, he didn't say if he was referring to the backup or restore process. I had asked about an option on the restore side, but the rest of his note discussed using Drive Image to make backups. He also never addressed the issue of making a restore of a partition with an Error 1532. Why do tech support people never respond directly to a question? I asked Dennis to explain his answer.

A few days later he said "You can choose to ignore file system errors during restore, but there is no guarantee the image will work." Again, it's not clear if he is referring to the restore process not working or the partition still having errors after it has been restored. He suggested running Drive Image with either the "/ifc" or "/ire" command line options but did not say which versions/releases of the product he was referring to. I own version 2 and was asking about version 5 to decide whether to purchase it or not. 

Three attempts to get an answer and I'm still confused as to whether DI5 will restore the partition in question.

Short Product Life Span    back to top

December 26, 2001. Ed Foster, writing in the December 10, 2001 issue of InfoWorld magazine, discussed the short product support life span of Partition Magic. Quoting: "One reader was upset that a version of Partition Magic he had purchased a little more than a year ago had been taken off PowerQuest's list of supported products. In asking how to get Partition Magic 5.01 to work on Windows 2000, he received a reply from PowerQuest that his product was out of its  'support life cycle' and would no longer be supported. The surprise was not that he couldn't get complimentary support, but that he could not even pay for help with a product he'd purchased just 15 months before." All support ceases for a PowerQuest product one year after the next release is introduced. Since they introduce products at least once a year the result is that users have to upgrade frequently.

Something like this happened to me too. I went to the PowerQuest web site to see if there were any bug fixes for Partition Magic version 6. They no longer provide bug fixes for version 6, only for version 7. Needless to say, they also don't allow downloads of bug fixes for users of version 5 or earlier. So not only do they not provide support, they don't even let you do your own support. In my opinion this an excellent reason to purchase a competing product. For another reason, see this other gripe.

FYI    back to top

FYI: PowerQuest says that Partition Magic version 6 is not compatible with Windows XP. Version 7 fully supports XP. However, you can still install XP on a computer with an earlier version of Windows and Partition Magic 6 by using version 6 to make unallocated space on the hard disk. At install time, you can direct Windows XP to install a clean version of itself into the unallocated space. In addition, pqboot works just fine with Windows XP. From the earlier version of Windows, pqboot will get you into XP. If you copy pqboot from the earlier version of Windows to the XP partition, it will run under XP and get you back to the earlier version of Windows. Two things I have not tried, and do not intend to try, are installing the full Partition Magic program under XP and using version 6 to resize the XP partition. When running version 6 from the earlier version of Windows, it incorrectly reports that the XP partition has no free space. April 26, 2002. 

FYI: Partition Magic 6: When converting a FAT partition to NTFS under Windows 2000 it opens a DOS window and uses a Windows 2000 utility for the conversion. A FAT partition that started with 16K clusters ended up as NTFS with 512k clusters. The rescue (floppy) disk version of Partition Magic 6 will not convert a FAT partition to NTFS. It seems Partition Magic is simply providing a GUI front end to the existing Windows utility for this function. 

FYI: Resizing a partition is not a trivial undertaking and should something go wrong during the resize operation, you may lose all access to the partition. Therefore, it is best to insure the health of the partition, files and hard disk before resizing. To this end,  chkdisk or scandisk (as appropriate for your flavor of Windows) and also to defrag the partition. This insures Windows is happy. Then, also use Partition Magic to check the partition for errors. Then backup up your important files. (December 2000).  Version 8 of Partition Magic comes with an Important Notice that Windows 2000 users should (a) run "chkdsk /f" before running Partition Magic and (b) upgrade to the latest service pack. (February 10, 2003) 

FYI: Bug fixes for version 7 can be downloaded here. In a newsletter dated February 5, 2002 PowerQuest said that the download is 21.3 MB and will upgrade v7 users to version 7.01.  
Update. September 21, 2004. A reader pointed out that this link no longer works. In fact, Symantec does not provide the upgrade to version 7 any more. What a miserable way to treat customers. 

FYI: When booting from rescue floppy disks, Partition Magic 8.01 can not read or write USB connected devices. October 26, 2005. 

FYI: With version 8, the conversion from a primary partition to a logical/extended partition is very slow. FYI: While moving icons around on my desktop, I somehow got this Usage list from the Partition Magic icon. I suspect this is a list of startup options. I seem to recall using a couple of them at the direction of PowerQuest tech support.