Can you really boot from Norton Partition Magic 8.0?

[357mag]

I just bought Norton Partition Magic 8.0 with the intent of running the program from the CD, since they say it is "bootable". I'm finding out the opposite however. When I put the disc in the tray and restart my computer, instead of seeing a GUI like I expected, after some text and stuff it goes to an A:\ prompt. What the hell?

So I don't know what to do. So I type DIR at the A:\ prompt and I basically see this:

Command or filename not recognized
A:\>

Volume in drive A does not have a label
Directory of A:\

ATAPI_CD SYS
AUTOEXE BAT
BM BAT
COMMAND COM
CONFIG SYS
GETCH EXE
HIMEM SYS
IBMBIO COM
IBMDOS COM
MSCDEX EXE
PM BAT
PTEDIT EXE
SMARTDRV EXE
TAISATAP SYS
DOS



A:\ _

It also says things like this:

The A: drive is the bootable portion of the CD.
The main Symantec utilities and programs are located in the Y: drive.
Device Driver not found MSCD001
No valid CDROM device drivers selected

That's mostly what it says on the screen. Someone told me all I have to type at the A:\ prompt is pm.

So I type pm and hit Enter. It still does not work. It just says something like "command not recognized" or something like that.

So then I type PM and hit Enter. No difference.

I chatted with a Symantec support person and he said my disc may be corrupted. So he gave me an URL to download the full version. I did that and I burned it to disc.

Guess what? When I tried it, the exact same thing happened. So there is nothing wrong with my original disc.

When I tried making Rescue Disks after I installed Partition Magic it asked me to insert a 1.44 MB floppy in my drive. I no longer have any floppy drives. Sorry.

I'm pretty dumbfounded. They say it's a bootable disc, but I can't figure out how to boot from this disc.

If anyone knows how please advise.

[Paul Komski]

It is booting to the A: part of the CD with PM for DOS and a few other bits and pieces.

Possibly autoexec is bad in some way but you could just try entering PM at the command prompt - and report back.

[357mag]

I tried entering PM at the prompt but it's a no-go. Doesn't work. I suspect the real problem is my drives are not compatible with the disc, cuz when you read the part about "no valid device drivers..." and "device driver not found..." it leads me to think that my drives as are not compatible with the disc.

If I could build a custom .iso maybe that would work, but I havent' a clue as to how.

[357mag]

Talked to Symantec again. He said it's not possible to add any drivers. But he said this message can occur if the drive Partition Magic is trying to boot from is set to Primary or Secondary Slave.

He suggested changing jumper settings on the CD-ROM so it's Secondary Master.

[mjc]

What kind of drives do you have....IDE or SATA? for both hard drives and opticals...

[357mag]

I'm pretty sure both my drives are IDE. One is a CD-ROM and the other is a DVD burner.

[mjc]

Then check the jumpers, as per the suggestion from tech support...

[Paul Komski]

It does seem likely that you just cannot access the CD part (the Y: drive part) of the CD and that the .bat files may be trying to access it that way.

You could maybe try a DOS floppy on a CD from Appendix2 (http://paulski.com/zpages.php?id=1711#append2). Its a small ISO to burn <2MB and should also boot to an A: prompt but with R: as the first and S: as the second optical drive letters. You can remove the disk and reinsert the PM disk or just add it to the second drive. Then see if R: and S: can access the opticals. If so dir the PM disk and see if there is a PM exe file on it.

It both CDs cannot access the CD part of the CD (as opposed to the "floppy part of the CD") then there would seem to be a general problem accessing your opticals from DOS.

BiNG Trial (in my sig) and GParted Live ISO (http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=115843&package_id=271779) Free are both good alternatives that can do all that PM can do and often better.