My Continuing Partition Magic Troubles

This is really bugging me now. I thought that there was some application that was preventing my Partition Magic (8.0) from loading. Whenever I open it, or PQ's Drive Image also, it just freezes on the splash screen.

Well today I installed a new hard drive. I deleted my previous system partition. I installed a clean windows XP. And then Partition Magic. There is NO OTHER software currently installed on my machine!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! and I have not used it to access the internet yet either, so it is a "virgin" system. The first time I opened PM, it worked. But then I tried to do something simple like change a drive letter on another partition and it froze.
The other partition I was trying to change was on the other (now "old") hard drive and is NTFS. Pm is on a FAT32 part.

I changed the drive letter using windows' disk management console. but from then on PM FREEZES on the splash screen exactly as before!!!! There has got to be something with my windows or disk partitions.

The new hard drive was totally raw, out of the box. I used the windows XP install CD to create the system partition. Should I have booted using the PQ floppy and allowed Partition Magic to create the partition? Is there with the way it was formatted?

I used the windows install cd to create a FAT32 partition for the C: system partition. it is into this partition that I installed Partition Magic. Should I have done NTFS instead?? (would that interfere with PM loading?)

My "old" hard drive has partitions that are NTFS (converted from FAT32), so should all the partitions on my system be one or the other not mixed - could that cause PM to freeze?????

Well, i have narrowed it down now. There is no anti virus or firewall or spyware or any other application installed. Brand new formatted drive. There's not much else it could be other than something with the partition formatting itself or windows - but PM says that it works with windows XP - this is the new version.

Any clue????????

 

Have you ever checked your BIOS to see that the boot sector protection or virus protection was disabled?

 

Yep...I checked my BIOS and turned off the virus alert. That did not help.

If it was BIOS related I dont think it would run at all. since it works in Safe Mode I think its a windows thing - maybe something along the lines of windows not giving access to the drive? I know if you try to run chkdsk it will say "can't lock drive - schedule check at re-boot" so somehow I think windows is having exclusive access to the drives. How do I change that? Other people have run PM with no problems so I dont know what I could be doing wrong.

 

I've used PM on a ton of different hardware and O/S versions, so I'd have to believe there's something specific in your hardware that is causing it problems. Have you turned off DMA on all the hard disks in the BIOS, just as a test?

 

What is DMA? I went into BIOS and do not see a selection for it at all.

 

Under the Integrated I/O section of the BIOS setup, you should see entries for UDMA for each of the four possible IDE disks. That's the setting I'm talking about disabling. Note that your system will run like a slug if you turn this off for good, this is just to see if that's causing the problem.

 

Nope, that didn't help.

 

I don't have any more ideas...

 

Have you tried creating the PM emergency startup disks and then rebooting from the disks and running PM from there.....that's what I always do.