No one likes my hard drive. :[

[Xaven]

Heyas,

So I got me a notebook for Christmas/Birthday/Graduation from me mother two weeks ago which obviously came with an even further crap-laden version of Vista 64bit. I wanna duel boot XP and Vista, so I went to go format and repartition everything in my HD. Buuut, PartitionMagic8 gave me the wonderful message of "Partition table error #105 found" when trying to read the drive to see what was there. Trying to format the drive gave me "Error #4, bad argument/parameter". Great.

So I whipped out my GParted CD to see if it could do anything. It couldn't. It wouldn't even go to GUI like it usually does, but went to a slightly fancy command line. ...And I wasn't about to deal with that.

So, why is my hdd not readily interpreted by such partitioning programs? Is there just a quick setting I have to fix, or do I have to pull out the big guns and soak my laptop in bleach?

I stand ready and poised to shoot out any more info if asked, o' course.

[rubah]

Partition Magic supposedly doesn't like vista, like at all. I don't know about gparted though. would it have to do with having a 64bit machine?

[Peegee]

These are just questions so I strongly suggest you not do anything unless you know what you're doing:

- You were trying to format the drive: can I assume you have a recovery console? If you are using that, doesn't it look at the volume size of your C drive and complain if it's not the right size? IE: you are trying to re-partition your C drive and this may cause problems if the recovery console doesn't like your new C drive.

- If you aren't using a recovery console and have the cd/dvd or something, could you try wiping the partition another way? Use a linux disc or something like that.

[o_O]

I'd download a small Linux liveCD (Gentoo has one of the smaller ones, I think) and use cfdisk from the command line. It's about as straightforward as using a graphical partitioning tool and runs as a frontend to fdisk, which isn't that easy to use by itself. The error message you're getting means that Partition Magic couldn't find a valid master boot record.

One other thing to try is rather than formatting the partition straight off, try deleting it, writing that partition table to the disk and then recreating the partition(s) as NTFS/FAT32/whatever you like.

[Xaven]

rubah: Why can't everyone just be more accepting? ;__;

PG: I'm gonna reinstall with a DVD. There is a recovery console (I think? Can't remember.), but I just plan on wiping it away too. Those things are silly. :P

o_O: I do still have an old Ubuntu CD from a year ago, so I'll just use that. :] Tomorrow!

[XxSephirothxX]

It might not even be worth dual-booting Vista, considering Windows 7 is already in Beta and seems to be a very worthwhile replacement.

[o_O]

I didn't know Windows 7 was in beta already. I'm gonna have to give it a test drive. If the Vista betas are anything to go by (and they may well not be since Vista was an entirely new framework) then there could be serious stability issues in the new betas.

Also, in order to easily install a Vista/XP dual-boot, make sure you install XP first. This way the Vista installation is able to detect the presence of XP and will contain entries in the bootloader for both operating systems, whereas it doesn't work the other way around.

[Rostum]

I didn't know Windows 7 was in beta already. I'm gonna have to give it a test drive. If the Vista betas are anything to go by (and they may well not be since Vista was an entirely new framework) then there could be serious stability issues in the new betas.

A lot of people are saying the Windows 7 is running A LOT better in beta, than Vista is running at the moment. But I guess you'll find out for yourself. I don't know too much about it yet.

[Namelessfengir]

also what version of XP are you going to install? because your machine came with 4 gigs of ram and the only version of xp that can handle that is 64 bit otherwise it only uses three gigs

[crono_logical]

PartedMagic - I didn't think I'd mention this live CD twice in on day, only 50 MB or so It also uses GParted, and is far superior to Partition Magic