can somebody please help. I have windows 98 SE on my 80 GB western digital hard drive, and when i try to partition it I keep getting errors. I have tried using Partition Magic 8.0 and it gives me an "error 4001 creating batch". I can't figure out why. When i just try to install Red Hat 8.0 and use the automatic partition in it (and the other manual partitions) it gives me an error message there to....can somebody please help me?

Have your tried rebooting into DOS and using the dreaded fdisk? Maybe part of your hard drive is corrupt. How about running scandisk?

i haven't ran scandisk in a while...i will try it
as for fdisk...i didn't want to use it unless i had to because i'm not very familiar with it.
my hard drive better not be corrupt either...its only 3 months old!!

ok....whenever i enter red hat 8.0 and click on automatic partition...it gives me this error:
Could not allocate requested partitions:
Partitioning failed: Could not allocate partitions as primary partitions.
Then after that box pops up....another box pops up and says that a / root directory and stuff needs to be difined...but isn't the automatic partition supposed to do that for you???
can anybody help me?

Not necessarily: an automatic partitioner will create partitions automatically, but you still need to define a / mount point which is completely different from creating a partition.

Cool

ok...well i was trying to create the partitions earlier using partition magic 8.0 ....and everytime it would try to make the partition it would give me an error saying:
"error 4001 while executing batch"
I looked at the web site and found what error 4001 was...and it says: "no valid Redirection Area Information Table found:
Is there something that i need to do before i try to partition???
Do i have something in my bios that's keeping it from partitioning?

Not that I've ever heard of. However on some of the 'pre-built' boxes some of the manufacturers are doing things to make it really hard to partition the drive, this might be one of those situations (if this is a pre-built box). If you don't have any data you cannot live without, and a reformat wouldn't kill ya, Go ahead and wipe the drive clean. Make your partitions how you'd like to (using either linux fdisk or DOS fdisk) and then reinstall. Put win on first then linux.

Cool

Yes, backup your essential Windows files and run defrag to push the information to the front of the disk. Always make a backup before juggling with your partition table. Always.

Here's a guess - being as dull as it is at system level maintenance, Windows 98 has not cleanly defragmented the disk, and you have chunk of 'unmoveable' blocks toward the end of the Win98 partition.

DO NOT USE PARTITION MAGIC. You shouldn't ever need to use that program, unless you're trying to do resizing partitions w/o using GNU parted - behind the nice GUI partitionmagic is .... fdisk! You think I'm joking? How many programs do you know are reliably used to alter partition tables?

Try rerunning defrag. Look at the detailed view. Cab you see rogue blocks toward the end of the drive?

If that's not the problem, use a copy of tomsrtbt disk. Everyone should have this disk!! And run fdisk. Look at your partition table. If you can mount the Windows partition, copy the output of

fdisk -l /dev/hda

to somewhere on Windows and post the output here.

Nice one Bert. I don't have Tom's because my floppy drive doesn't work! However, I do have knoppix, and do well with it

Yeah, I am seeing way too many people asking for help because PM dorked their disk lately. I think it became too much of a necessity in win that people cannot partition without it

Cool

i had defragged my hard drive 2 days before i tried to partition it....and when the partition didn't work, i defraged again just to make sure that the blocks toward the end of the drive was not a problem. I'll download that Toms thing and try it, what is it supposed to do???

Tom's is said to be a full linux distro on floppy. You can do so many things with it. Your case, you probably will be using linux fdisk on it, and maybe parted if it's part of the floppy...

Cool

ok....fdisk is a problem....i didn't use toms....i just restarted in dos and went into fdisk, and when i tried to create another partition, it told me that i didn't have any room. I went into partition magic again (cause Bert said only if resizing partitions) to resize my C: partition, and when my comp restarted and tried to write to it, it gave me that same error 4001. I have no clue what's the matter with this thing...i've tried looking for something in my bios that would be keeping it from writing to the hard drive, nothing works.

Is there a way to reduce the size of your partition without formatting your hard drive and recreating your partitions???

FYI Linux fdisk is completely different than DOS fdisk...

Ranish Partition Manager does partition resizing on winbloze drives.
Bert might have also had other reasons for you to get and use toms, so you might still consider using it

Cool

Yes, you must use the fdisk after booting with tomsrtbt disk.

Post the output of:

fdisk -l /dev/hda