My wonderful windows machine finally experienced a fatal failure. The system began randomly ignoring installed devices and software on Friday. By Sunday the system would barely load and not much else. It's not a virus, just too much usage on the pc. I have done a complete format of the drives but I have run across a slightly major problem.

One of my newer drives is now refusing partitions. I have tried every utility that I am aware to try and fix the partition table errors. Here's what I think is happening.

The drive that is experiencing the issues had LINUX installed. When the pc crashed there was no way to recover and therefore LINUX still exists on that drive. When I run FDISK from the Win98 Boot disk it tells me that there are still logical dos drives in the extended dos partition and won't let me remove it. I have checked and there are no logical dos drives in the extended dos partition. Partition Magic crashes in windows when I attempt to load it and gives a fatal error from dos when I attempt to format the drive.

The drive is a MAXTOR, Model 98196H8 (80 GB). I have downloaded the maxtor utilities (PowerMax and MaxBlast Plus II) and both have indicated that the drive is physically sound.

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OK, after having typed all this in I took another look at the MAXTOR Site and they say that there is a low level format utility that should erase the partition data. I will be trying that now, but if anyone has any other ideas, just in case this doesn't work, I would appreciate it.

Headaches (and it really does)

Can't offer any help at the moment. see how you go on with LLF.

don't forget to post back your reults though, as their are a few of us experiencing problems with partitions, Linux and Partition Magic.

You could try running this Debug script to clear partition sector (http://www.firmware.com/support/bios/hdclear.htm). It has worked for me when fdisk did not recognize the boot partition. Note their instructions and have only the drive you want to clear installed as the first physical drive, then boot with a floppy that has debug, or with a boot disk that puts debug in a RamDrive.

The LLF worked great. It took 4.5 hours to complete but it did work. Ran FDISK after the LLF, Set the Disk as one large partition and reformatted in Windows. Everything seems to working now.