I am using parition magic to partition my hard drive; I had two primary partition, one was hidden. I rcently formated what was on the hidden partition and deleted it; it leaves me with half of my hard drive with unloccated space. When I try to redistribute the free space, the process is aborted because it claims that thereis a CRC error; in the help it says that it has to do with the bad sector data. What can I do to overcome this problem. Should I recreate the partition and then merge? or what else? Thank you, Gui.

If it really is a CRC error, it could mean that your hard drive has a physical error, in which case you may have to back up all your data and then replace the drive.
Alternatively, copy any important partitions to another hard drive temporarily, or back them up to some other medium, then use the DOS FDISK command to delete that partition (and all others - FDISK is nasty and should be used with care - it WILL wipe all your hard drive).
You can then recreate the partition and try again, using a boot disk and PartitionMagic. But if it really is a physical hard drive problem, you'll lose data again...
Alex

You could try doing a low-level format. This might fix the CRC error.

I have a similar problem. I had Windows XP on one side and Linux on the other. I had to reload XP of course because of all the viruses. After that, my linux partition disapeared. Windows just took over. When I did fdisk in dos, my Linux partition is still there, but no way to boot to it. I also received some kind of CRC error. I doubt I have a hard drive problem. Does Windows rewrite the master boot record or something?

I am using Partition Magic and have an error message "#1516 Partition Improperly Dismounted". How is this cured? Welcome helpful advice.

I remember having a similar problem. After formatting my win xp partition and then reinstalling the OS, I lost my select OS to boot screen, losing my ability to boot to my Redhat linux partition. I believe the boot manager was called GRUB (can't remember version), and I never did fix the problem (ended up formatting the linux partition to make room for Windows backup, the way it crashes). However, I heard the problem could be fixed by using the linux installation CD's to reinstall and setup the boot manager. Sorry I have to be so vague, hope this helps.
On another note, I too am getting the "improperly dismounted error", using PM to resize a Primary NTFS partition running Win XP. On the same harddisk is a logical partition with an image file which is a backup of a previous win xp setup. That is yet another problem altogether; the program that created the image file won't boot from the CD the thing created, so I can't said previous setup (which I must do). I was trying to create a third Primary partition so that I could restore the image file from logical partition to this third partition, using the program (Acronis True Image 6.0) which resides on the Primary partition I'm currently forced to use.
I'm pretty much on the verge of losing it.

I were getting the "improperly dismounted error", using PM to resize a LOGICAL NTFS partition on my 120gb SATA drive. WINXP sometimes did RANDOM RESTARTS because of this 1532 error, I think. So the best way to try is USING FDISK to wipe out all data and then LOW-LEVEL format!
I was tired of using the 20gb HD as first HD to be booted, and this SATA for ´storage drive´ due to WINXP restarting when (re) installed on the first partition of this mis-partitioned disk (i think)

Hi.
I have got a BIG problem with my hard disk and any quick help would be appreciated.
Here is the story:
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1.my hard HAD two partitions C: 70G(winXP) and D: 10G(win98)
2.I started the computer in the win98 command prompt
3.deleted all of the files only in the ROOT of C:\ except command.com, IO.sys, MSDOS.sys NO directory was deleted! and then formated my D: with format d:/q/u
I checked the files on drives and D was clean and C has all of my old stuff.
now after restarting my computer I have C: 10G(EMPTY!) and D: 10G with all the old information!
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What the ...
How I can retrieve my stuff ?

My machine is a sony vaio notebook 505bx with 256mb ram, and a 40 gig HD running winXP.
I use PartitionMagic to manage several partions (separate ones for windows, programs, and files) including one for a linux SuSe installation (which I use too rarely).
When resizing my windows partition last night, PM generated the error that since I was trying to move space from a small backup partition (FAT32) to my windows partion (NTFS), it could not complete the operation. Ouch.
Following the restart, the SuSe GRUB loader does not start and I cannot access windows or linux. I can boot with the PM CD (good, but only to the PM dos version) and see my drives listed in PM, but now there is the 211 unallocated MB (presumably caught betweenthe backup-FAT32 partition and the windows-NTFS partion). The only partition with a letter is BOOTMAGIC (C:). Windows should be C: (obviously). When selecting the disk info from the PM menu for the three NTFS partitions, it prompts with error code #1516 (partition improperly dismounted). Double ouch.
WHAT SHOULD I DO? I am sorry that this may be a simple question, but I haven't encounted anything like this before.
Any help offered would be greatly appreciated.