Lessons Learned: When using Partition Magic to reduce an NTFS partition in order to make another partition larger, be very very very sure to run DiskCheck on that NTFS partition FIRST. I spent two very nerve-wracking hours this morning trying to recover from a PM error (that Google located on Thompson's page from 98).

The error was #1518 File Attribute Does Not Fit. That kiboshed the drive to the point where it would only boot to a blue screen of death that said "Boot Device Inaccessible". Trying to repair it in PM returned Error #46 Seek Error.

Not happy. Not happy.

Google further located a website where this exact problem was described, along with the solution of booting to the original installation CD for the OS and loading the Recovery Console, then running CHKDSK.

That did indeed correct the problem and allowed me to breathe once more.

The entire episode happened because I was trying to back up my bosses' laptop with Ghost, to a partition I had created years ago just to hold the image. The new image was too large, and wouldn't fit. So I was using PM to make the partition larger.

I was doing the backup because the prior backup was from November 2004.

So the thought of losing the information on the drive was unpalatable, to say the least.

So, to reiterate:

ALWAYS RUN DISKCHECK BEFORE RUNNING PARTITION MAGIC!