I love PQMagic, but I'm always creating diskettes because I constantly lose them and it's really annoying. so I took the morning to create one CD which would boot to partition magic and also be able to install the program from inside windows.

I didn't expect as many road blocks as I encountered, but after much convincing the computer decided to co-operate with me and I have a working bootable partition magic cd.

here's what I did. made a bootable diskette with a spare 98 machine (format a: /s) if you use XP/2K you are going to need to delete some of the extra stuff it puts on there - (all the keyboard stuff display.sys etc) otherwise everything won't fit.

I added RAMDRIVE and mouse Support

I then zipped up all the partition magic files I needed into one file from the second rescue disk.
PQMAGIC.OVL
PQMAGIC.PQG
PQPB.RTC
RESCUE.TXT
zABOUT.PQG
PQMAGIC.EXE
I also found a dos unzip program.

I edited the batch files so that the computer starts, establishes a ramdrive of 3MB. It copies the files it needs to the ramdrive and unzips the contents of the zip file there then launches partition magic.

after I tested the floppy disk, I used it to create a bootable CD (I used roxio because it's on my work computer but I'd prefer to use nero and may still make another at home) I added the partition magic windows setup file and serial number text and burnt the cd. booting into partition magic now takes about 20 seconds and 1 cd.

if anyone is interested in this I can try to put a disk image of the floppy disk minus the partition magic zip file on web space, then you can create the disk, make your zip file, drop it on the disk then make your bootable CD. let me know if this is of interest to anyone else.