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joanneL2

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Returning from Partition Magic to Fdisk

I have Partition Magic 4 on a 27 gig hard drive divided into 5 partitions.  I used Fdisk to look at the drive and it only shows one partition, no extended partitions, no logical drives.  I wanted to re-format my C: drive, but I get error messages using the regular DOS format command.  Apparently, it doesn't like the PM drive.  It's reported as a non-dos drive.  

This is what I want to do:
I want no part of Partition Magic left in my system.  I want to use Fdisk and only Fdisk to re-partition the 27 gig drive and I want to use regular old Format to format all the partitions.

Trouble is, I seem to be in a "Catch 22" where I can't use fdisk because of PM.  How the heck do I get my hard drive back to a state (like, say, just out of the box) so I can start fresh???

Help!!

P. S.  Thanks you guys.  You are the BEST!!!
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dbrunton
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Try the following partition manager to remove all the present partitions and then use fdisk

http:://www.come.to/ranish
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boom23

Have you tried deleting the partiton eventhough there's only 1 partition. And also try to delete the non-dos partition, coz fdisk might see the paritions as non-dos partitions. If no luck try ranish's parition manager as above, it's an awesome manager.
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oldgreyguy

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Thanks all...I will try everything and let you know what worked.  Can't tell you how much I appreciate you!!
With partion magic try marking all the partitions as not hidden. That should allow you to see them in FDISK.
I would just delete all the partitions using partition magic.
Then use Fdisk to repartition. It is simple and it has worked for me in the past when I had similar problems.
I hope this helps.
Which version of FDISK are you using?
Newer versions of Partition Magic create partitions compatible with newer operating systems (Windows 98, Windows NT 4), and mark the partitions with flags that older versions of FDISK do not recognize.

I, too, would use P.M. to delete all the partitions.
The basics worked OldGreyGuy.  I WAS able to delete the non-dos partition using Fdisk.  Once that was accomplished, the rest was gravy.  Thanks!

And thanks to everyone else who submitted comments!  

I tried Ramish's partition manager, but it was more complicated than I wanted.  Still, I have a copy of it for possible future reference.
NON-DOS partition? hum wasn't my idea good enough, or should I put things into steps next time?
Boom23:  Steps not necessary and actually, all the answers were very similar, so I had a tough time deciding who should get the points.  They should have an easy way to SPLIT points when there is more than one good answer.  Thanks...and sorry.
oh that's cool.. usually people gives points to the comment that comes first.