Partition Magic 8.0 - Partition table error #105 found

I have a system with one large partition. It has Vista x64 build 5381
on it. The file system is the new version of NTFS from Vista, formatted
from within the Vista install program.

Anyway, I wanted to resize the partition, but I can't do anything with
the drive in PartitionMagic right now; I get the error listed in the
Subject line. A quick Google reveals:

105 - Partition does not start on cylinder boundary

The Head value of CHS begin is not 0 or 1. PartitionMagic expects all
FAT, HPFS and NTFS partitions to start and end on cylinder boundaries.
(Comment: Windows NT on Alpha does not comply with this rule, and can
create partitions starting on arbitrary sectors. There is no known
operating system that requires this restriction. However, there exists
software that tries to guess the disk geometry by looking at the CHS
start and end values in a partition table. Note that with large disks
CHS values are entirely meaningless.)

Any idea on how I can fix this so I can actually work with the
partition? I haven't had much luck with fdisk /mbr in the past. I'm
totally stuck, and any help would be appreciated.

Thanks.

 

Contact the Author of the OS BETA program you are testing for the fix.
As you agreed to when you chose to test a BETA APP.

 

Today, with great enthusiasm and quite emphatic, laid this
spiel on an innocent readership

It isn't a good idea to try and fool Mother Nature. PM got
homogonized out of existance when Symantec bought it from
PowerQuest, but even so, one can hardly expect a product to work
on a beta O/S. Sure hope you're playing with fire - i.e., Vista,
on a dual-boot or completely different PC and that you have done
frequent image backups, else you'll soon be getting a visit from
Murphy (if you haven't already).

 

This is officially the least helpful newsgroup EVER!

 

Your post as well does not help me. Try again.

 

Today, with great enthusiasm and quite emphatic, laid this spiel
on an innocent readership

As has already been pointed out, contact the manufacturer of PM and
Vista, between the two of them, they can help you. Or, not. People
who choose to beta test software, especially O/S, should be fully
aware of the risks and take proper precautions. One other
suggestion, look at the ssytem requirements and operating systems
supported by PM 8.0. Do you find Vista there? It isn't in my
version.

 

Today, with great enthusiasm and quite emphatic, laid this spiel
on an innocent readership

you came here with a problem that isn't even addressed by this NG,
what did you expect? again, contact Symantec and Microcrap as well
as the manufacturer of your PC and its various components. If,
after doing that and re-re-reviewing the system requirements and
O/S's supported by PM 8.0 and you still don't get help, sue the
bastards!

 

You just love crapping all over my dreams, don't you? Listen, buddy,
I'm a senior vice admin at Microsoft, so don't even get started with
me.

 

Hiya .

Every time I've used Partition Magic I've always had to revert to
reformat/reinstall. It's a dangerous tool to use with existing filesystems,
and as you formatted the drive with Vista then I'd strongly suspect that
it's the beta filesystem itself that's causing the problems due to PM not
providing support for it.

 

You, sir, are a disgrace to your species.

 

If all it takes is one person's opinion regarding the helpfulness or
other attribute of a newsgroup, this and every other group has as many
shades of usefulness as there are participants. Thanks for sharing.
;->

 

So you expect an assorted miscellany of people who just happen to hang out
in a newsgroup not even related to computers, to somehow produce an
instant, concise, detailed, and faultlessly correct, set of step-by-step
instructions to get you out of the hole you've dug for yourself by using
a beta-testing operating system and file system? And to do it free, and
quicker than the people who created the beta-testing stuff that you are
playing with?

If the beta-testing OS you are testing lacks the means to create, format,
and manage, partitions which it can itself recognise as 'valid', then
perhaps, just perhaps, that could be exactly the sort of thing that the
producers of that OS expect their beta-testers to at least report in
excruciationg detail - if not provide a viable 'fix' for as well.

It is of course entirely unreasonable to expect some other program to have
any idea how the as-yet unreleased and unfinished beta-testing OS might
create and format partitions, so you shouldn't be at all surprised that
'Partition Magick' gets confused.

If you 'haven't had much luck with fdisk /mbr in the past' perhaps you
should surrender your 'Microsoft beta-tester' secret decoder ring and go
back to using operating systems that have already been officially released
with full support.

 

Perhaps *you* should surrender your license for being a human.

 

Powerquest developed the product to run under Windows. It doesn't run
under Linux, HP-UX, AIX, AS/400, IBM VM, Solaries, SCO, OS/X, or any
other operating system. So Powerquest developed the product based on
what Microsoft had incorporate to their partitioning requirements for
Microsoft's operating system - and, according to you, that has been to
require that partitions start on a cylinder boundary. Well, now Vista
has, according to, decided to abandon that requirement to equalize it
with other operating systems that also do not have that requirement.

Symantec is a software publisher, not a software developer. Every
product they have was bought from someone else. They bought Powerquest
to quash them out of existence. They used the engine from DriveMagic to
replace their antiquated Ghost engine but they don't seem to care about
any of the other products they got from Powerquest. So, just as when
they bought PC Tools, their intent is to let the product wane and
eventually vaporize. That means PartitionMagic will not be getting
updated to support a new version of NTFS. In fact, when NTFS changed
from version 4 to version 5, PM had problems with NTFS5, too (it's been
too long for me to remember what PM couldn't handle with NTFS5). No
product can be forward compatible, especially when the product is
developed when whatever you think with which it should be forward
compatible doesn't even exist yet even in the planning stage.

The days of PM are numbered. Symantec isn't going to update it. If
Microsoft makes changes to NTFS or to any other file system then any
tools that based themselves on the old versions will have to get updated
to handle those changes. It is highly unlikely that Symantec will
update PM. If you attempt to install and use a product on an operating
system that the product does not specify that it supports, well, then
it's iffy whether the product will work or not. Products that rely
solely on the system API to perform those functions will continue to
work. Low-level products, like PM, are more susceptible to changes in
the OS.

PM doesn't support the change in NTFS that Microsoft implemented in
their beta Vista OS. Okay, so how are you going to get PM to work? You
could contact Symantec (they have a web form for submitting support
requests) but they'll probably simply say that the staid product that
they will not be updating doesn't support that OS. You could try to use
PM on Linux, too, but Symantec will simply tell you that PM doesn't
support that OS. Since YOU were the one that chose to migrate to Vista
then it is your responsibility to first check if the drivers are
available, if your low-level tools will work (guess that is what you've
just done regarding PM), and if your applications will run. You are
running a beta OS so *you* are the beta tester. That was your choice.
Hopefully you weren't so foolish as to make this beta OS your only OS;
i.e., you don't go testing beta software on your workstation, critical
host, or your only computer unless you don't *use* your computer and
instead just want to continually play with it or need the training.

There are newsgroups dedicated to Vista. Don't bother asking this group
about what some particular beta software can or cannot do or problems
with it. Do you ask a bunch of scuba divers on who manufacturers the
best parachute? Do you ask in a Word group about problems with AutoCAD?
Go ask in a community focused on the topic of your problem.

According to the manual (yep, I have PM8, too, but I really don't expect
it to support anything beyond Windows XP), it says:

"#105 Partition starts on wrong boundary
The hard-disk partition table contains erroneous values. PartitionMagic
expects
partitions to begin and end on the correct cylinder boundaries. If they
do not, the
disk may be partially corrupted. In this circumstance, if PartitionMagic
were to
make any modifications it might cause the loss of data. Therefore,
PartitionMagic
refuses to recognize any of the hard disk's partitions. To resolve this
problem, see
the instructions in "Resolving Partition Table Errors" on page 126."

Well, that pretty much means that you cannot use PM if Vista is creating
partitions that are not on a cylinder boundary (which is a pseudo
boundary since LBA geometry translation in the BIOS is based solely on
sectors and doesn't have cylinders anymore - but the BIOS will provide
an alternate CHS table since low-level utilities, like PM, still might
need those pseudo boundaries). Since Symantec isn't going to expend
resources on a product that it doesn't care about in the Powerquest
acquistion, you'll have to see if some other partition managers are
usable. Maybe the Ranish Partition Manager (www.ranish.com) might work.
It's free. Ask the software author about your problem before trying to
use it because maybe that program also only works on pseudo-cylinder
boundaries; however, it seems geared to support other OS'es than just
Windows. There is a link on their web page to a Yahoo Group where you
can ask questions, like if Ranish PM will support partitions that are
NOT on cylinder boundaries (since you say that Linux and other
non-Windows operating systems do not have that requirement).

Regardless of what operating system you have installed within a
partition, that partition is found by the BIOS. After the POST, the
BIOS finds the first fixed disk device, reads the first sector from it
(cyl 0, head 0, sector 1 which is the MBR), finds the partition table
(446 byte offset, or last 66 bytes - 64 for the four 16-byte partition
table records and 2 for the disk signature), finds which partition table
entry is marked as the active one, and reads that 16-byte entry to find
the start of the partition. Then the BIOS goes to the first sector of
that partition and passes control to the loader program located there
(that starts the load of the OS). Although the LBA geometry translation
changes CHS to a huge sector count, the partition table records still
use both the CHS scheme (for INT 13 compatibility) along with the LBA
sector count scheme to determine the start point of a partition. Well,
PM can run outside of Windows (i.e., you can use a DOS bootable floppy
on which PM installed its "rescue" setup) and PM may use the CHS entries
in the partition table records.

Read http://www.ata-atapi.com/hiwtab.htm, "Partition Table Rules", item
4, which discusses how *Microsoft's* FDISK utility works. It will
create partitions that start on cylinder boundaries. Voila! That why
PM expects Windows partitions to start on cylinder boundaries. It may
not require cylinder boundaries on non-Windows partition types
(designated by the partition type byte in the partition table record)
but since FDISK has traditionally enforced the cylinder boundary then PM
was coded to also check that compliance. Well, now Vista doesn't
enforce the cylinder boundary for partitions BUT the partition type byte
probably still specifies a Windows operating system (i.e., the partition
type byte still uses the old values to identify a DOS/Windows based
operating system; see
http://www.win.tue.nl/~aeb/partitions/partition_types-1.html for a list
of values for the partition types). There is no de facto standard value
for Vista (unless someone in the Vista group can identify the value for
us). Hey, you could do that. use a partition table editor to see what
value is in the partition type byte of the partition table record for
your Vista partition. Maybe Microsoft used a unique value, or they
could've used one of those that have previously designated a *NIX
operating system, but most likely Microsoft is still using the old
values for their old versions of Windows - and PM then gets confused
because FISK in those old versions of DOS or Windows forced the
DOS/Windows partitions to start on a cylinder. So, assuming you didn't
foolishly use Vista as your critical host and you are just experimenting
with it on a test host, I suppose you could try changing the partition
type from a Windows value to one that specifies a different operating
system, like Linux, and then see if the old and staid version of PM8
will then move that partition.

PM8 is coded for how FDISK worked under the old versions of DOS and
Windows. It won't understand non-standard partition boundaries used by
Vista if they don't match the old scheme enforced by the old FDISK
utility (well, for DOS/Windows partition types, that is). Symantec
updating PM to support Vista would sure surprise me. However, if you do
manage to get the Vista-created partition moved to a cylinder boundary,
I still wouldn't trust PM8 to be doing anything on it later. Since this
is a BETA operating system on which you are experimenting, is there a
reason why you cannot use a DOS bootable floppy and use FDISK to delete
all partitions and then recreate them so they *do* begin (and end) on
cylinder boundaries? If FDISK cannot understand the current
partition(s) (because they are not on cylinder boundaries), the setup
program for Vista should let you delete partitions (where then you would
normally create and format them in the rest of the install). In other
words, get rid of the partitions, even if you have to use a partition
table editor, and create them using FDISK, and then reuse those
preexisting partitions during the install of Vista. Then PM should be
handle those cylinder-bounded partitions that were created with a
pre-Vista version of FDISK, and Vista should be able to also use those
cylinder-bounded partitions created by a pre-Vista version of FDISK.

By the way, you didn't have to Google for the 105 error. The errors are
listed in the .pdf manual that gets included when you install PM.

 

No licence required.

Please learn how to 'quote' properly; G2 /can/ do it.

 

So go back to administering senior vice. Leave operating systems to
people who know a bit about them.

 

Please learn how to eat my poo.

People like you are what's wrong with the world.

 

I had the same issue in PM

What I did was use the Windows XP CD and get through to the point where you select your partition, after that I deleted the original partition and resized the partition to a smaller size after that quit the set-up and the machine will reboot. Insert your PM CD and it should work..

Hope It works for you guys 8)