Partition Magic Error 986

[travis4prez]

I have a 100G WD HD. I have a 15G C drive and used to have a couple of other partitions on there as well. I decided that some partitions needed more space and others less, so I just had to start fiddling with it. Now I have 80G that WinXP can't see. I can create, format, and convert these partitions with PM 8.0 but I can't assign them a drive letter. I get Error 986. I looked that up on Powerquest's site and it refered me to my autoexec.bat and config.sys files. I checked there for any of the named culprits but found nothing.
I ran WD's drive tools on the drive to make sure it wasn't toast and it has a clean bill of health.
Has anyone else run into this problem?

[Chuckiechan]

Generally, the drive partitions have to be on the primary drive. So you need to remove all of the paritions on the big drive, then reformat and load win xp. when that is done, you can create your partitions making the first one with the OS active.

It may be referring to a line in autoexec.bat or config.sys:
Lastdrv=Z

If it is set to E you won't be able to make a drive with a letter past E. So set it to Z.

[travis4prez]

then reformat and load win xp.

That is the part I'm trying to avoid. This is the only drive in the machine.
It was only a couple of weeks ago that I replaced the 30G that was in this machine. Had to reaload XP then. The machine that got the 30G drive had to have 98 reloaded as well. I'm kinda burnt on windows installs and I'm REALLY trying to avoid that.

BTW: lastdrive=z is what's there.
Thanks

[Gettinbye]

What filing system are your partitions? If XP is fat32 and your 80g is NTFS, then the only way to access the 80g is through the partitionmagic partition browser.
Also, PM8 does not allow multiple visible active partitions. If your 80g is set as active, it will be hidden by default.
If you use the PM8 filebrowser, and locate the SRDISKID file located in the 80g partition (should be in the restore folder), copy it, and paste it on your current partition (preferably on the desktop) so that you can access it after closing the PM8 browser. Open the SRDISKID file with notepad. It will contain one letter. It SHOULD NOT be the same letter as your currently active partition. If so, change it, and replace the file via the PM8 browser.

[travis4prez]

The C partition is NTFS. I looked for that file using PM but the disk is empty.
Something else odd. Windows Explorer shows I have a DVD drive. This is also the case in device manager. A SCSI DVD and a SCSI/RAID controller. That would be great if this machine actually had any of those. This is an old machine: Athlon 800 on a Shuttle AI61 MB. 1 HD and 1 CDRW and I haven't added a SCSI/RAID card. When I click on the DVD Drive in Explorer, it asks me to insert a disk. This has got to be part of the problem.
I uninstalled both the DVD and SCSI controller in device manager and restarted the computer. Both came back after the restart. Things are gettin wierd here

[Chuckiechan]

Check in your bios under hard drives and see if you are "auto detecting". Is XP showing up on your hdd?

You may be able to disable the conflicting devices in device mgr.

[travis4prez]

BIOS is set to autodetect and it is detecting the drive correctly. The machine boots up and runs with no problem. Device manager detects the drive correctly as a WDC WD1000JB
Nothing is conflicting in Device manager. There are just things there that don't exist.

[Gettinbye]

I doubt the partition is truly empty. Go to my computer>tools>folder options>view and check "show hidden files and folders", and uncheck "hide protected operating system files". Then you should be able to view the SRDISKID file through the PM8 browser.
as far as the SCSI/Raid controller, does your motherboard support raid? If so, you're just seeing that the board supports it and has the drivers installed.

[travis4prez]

Folder views are already set that way and the partition is empty.
This board doesn't support SCSI or RAID.
Thanks for all your help and keep the ideas coming.

[Gettinbye]

What board are you running?