Norton Partition Magic 8.0 Error 117

saiz66 · 09-19-2004, 07:38 PM

Hi. I have run Norton Partition Magic to split up my hard drive into 3 partitions and used it to install Linux.. everything seems okay.. but I realized I made the Linux partition too big and decided that it would be better to resize the partition.. when I opened Partition magic I got a few erros saying that something was out of place or something bout the partition and asked me if i wanted to fix it and i said Yes. I got a few more and i kept clicking yes... now I get an error which said:

Init failed: Error 117.
Partition's drive letter cannot be identified

Does anybody know how I can fix this without a reinstall of windows? Thanks!

miner · 10-14-2004, 03:08 PM

i am having the exact same problem. i am dual booting xp and fedora core 2 and i want to reduce the size of my linux partition and increase the size of my xp partition. partition magic detected two errors and fixed them both. now it just returns

Init failed: Error 117.
Partition's drive letter cannot be identified

did you get your hdd fixed saiz66? anyone have any ideas. tia.

morrolan · 10-14-2004, 04:12 PM

Yes, I also had this exact same problem, and it is to do with the way the 2.6 Kernel reads the partition table.

To fix it, you have to manually change your partition table ever so slightly, (it's non-damaging), and I recommend you use something like Knoppix for this so you aren't actually accessing the drive when you do it.

su to root in Knoppix, and pass the following command:

Code:

root@machine$ sfdisk -d /dev/hda | sfdisk --no-reread -H255 /dev/hda --force

Note: setting the heads of the drive "-H255" is correct for MOST drives, but not all, but even if you get it wrong, you will just still get error 117 ion Partition Magic 8

Hope it helps!

(this was covered here: http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/wig/4896 where I got it from)

johnc10 · 10-31-2004, 01:34 PM

This didn't work for me, still get error. I got around it by deleting my linux /boot, root and swap partitions and PM8/Ghost work ok. A bit more info given at http://www.fedorazine.com/content/view/191/ which also states how to install fedora without it messing with CHS. I'll reinstall Fedora as recommended i.e. not touching MBR, using Windoz as boot loader and installing Fedora passing CHS as an argument. I wouldn't normally bother except that PM8 and Ghost are excellent programs. Hopefully this will work!