BootMagic 8.0 Troubles

[eboyjones]

I purchased Partition Magic 8.0 and used it to resize partitions on a test pc.
I have WINXP PRO installed and want to install linux on another partition. I thought I would try BootMagic, since I had never used it before and it worked fine.

Now the problem. While sick at home, no excuse,I decided to play around with my partitions sizes before installing Linux. Being "Brain Dead" that day I resized before uninstalling boot magic, which was installed on a partiontion other that C:, that now no longer exists.

I got the boot error message,"can't find Btmagic.img" press any key to continue. I get rid of that error by using FIXMBR. But if I try to reinstall BootMagic I get an installation error that says setup can't find the partition where the original program was installed. And it won't since that partition no longer exists.

Now be kind fellows and ladies, since I am still sick, mental my wife says, and help me figure out how to rid my PC of all traces of BootMagic and be able to reinstall it. Not that I want to use it instead of Grub bootloader, but this problem may come up again and I want to be able to fix it.

Tried the following with no success;
removed all trace of program from registry.
used Regedit to clean anything left behind.
Ran scandisk and System Restore.
Looked at Google and at Symantec support.

I did not uninstall Partition Magic?

So any help would be appreciated.

[confus-ed]

Fdisk'll fix it

You have to understand all about how boot works to fathom this out, which is far too hard on a saturday morning (infact anytime) for my poor old addled brain to rattle off a full 'explain', but its because of exactly the same reason why you shouldn't install any unix/linux into the MBR in the first place (if intending to have multi boot) & use some boot loader & install it on the first sector of any partition you'll be using for that.

[Ferrit]

Or on a seperate harddrive. Thats usually the best option

[eboyjones]

That's what I figured and installed a seperate hd for Linux.Was able to rebuild the bootloader with the repair option on the xp cd.

But I still have to have a boot manager and wonder if any had success with BootMagic using Windows and Linux instead of using Lilo or Grubb?

[MobilePCPhysician]

Used it back in the day. Windows 98 and Red Hat. Became corrupted 2-3 times before I finally removed it. I know this was an earlier version. I wouldn't go near it even today. Use lilo.