On Fri, 8 Oct 2004, Alan J. Flavell wrote:

> One hazard, a I showed before, was that Partition Magic did not seem
> to care for a partition table that's been set up by Disk Druid.

I think I'm narrowing this issue down.  At the weekend I allowed Disk
Druid to create my *logical* partitions, within an extended partition
that had already been created (and approved!) by Partition Magic, and
afterwards PM still seemed happy with what it got.


I now think that the incompatibility is specific to *the extended
partition* (at least under the conditions in which I had been trying
it earlier).

Partition Magic then gripes in various ways, including sometimes
complaining that the extended partition needs, but does not have, the
ExtendedX attribute, but mostly by declaring that the partition table
has an irrecoverable error, often it's #105 or #114.

Once that had happened, PM continued to reject the partition table
until /not only/ the logical partitions have been deleted, /but also/
the extended partition itself has been deleted, leaving only the
primary partition(s) intact.  Once that had been done, it was possible
to reconstruct the intended logical partition structure (but using
fdisk, not "disk druid") without upsetting Partition Magic.  I hope
this is reasonably clear?


The safest move seems to be using Troy's suggestion (thanks!) which
I've been following, at least for manual installs: at the appropriate
moment to use ctrl/alt/f2 to go to a shell, use fdisk there to define
partitions, exit with "w" to write the partition table, then return to
disk druid to format and to assign the partitions their respective
mount points.  SL installation then proceeds happily, and the
resulting disk is till palatable to Partition Magic.

Thanks!