China DOS Union

The following is quoted from pfox at 2003-11-27 16:29:39:
Try adding spaces before and after the equals signs in Boot.ini. Also, I recommend using Smagic.

Running Pqmagic under Win2000 Server edition (note: server version)
　　During a disk scan, I found bad sectors on drive G:, so I planned to use the Chinese edition of Pqmagic 6.0 to isolate the bad sectors in partition G:, so as to prevent them from spreading.

　　However, when I entered DOS mode and started Pqmagic, the program did not run properly. Instead, it gave an error message: “Partition Magic cannot run on Windows NT/Windows 2000 Server.” After clicking OK, the program exited automatically. This was something I had not expected, because I had previously run Pqmagic on a computer at work with Windows 2000 installed, and there had been no such problem. But I remembered that the one at the company seemed to have Windows 2000 Professional installed, while what I have installed now is the Server edition. Judging from the prompt, Pqmagic indeed seemed to have some incompatibility with the Server edition of Windows 2000. My initial guess was that the hard disk booting was slightly different from the Professional edition and that this caused the problem, so I used a Windows 98 boot disk to boot into DOS and then ran Pamagic again, but this time the same error message still appeared.

　　Since it had nothing to do with the boot loader, then maybe it was the presence of some file in the root directory of drive C: under the Server edition (my Windows 2000 is installed on drive F that was preventing Pqmagic from running. So after backing up all the files in the root directory of C:, I deleted some files related to Windows 2000 from C: one by one. In the end I finally discovered that as long as the Boot.ini file existed, Pqmagic could not run normally. As long as I renamed Boot.ini and then ran Pqmagic, there was no problem at all.

　　In order to get to the bottom of this issue, after backing up the Boot.ini file on my hard disk, I used the Boot.ini file from the Windows 2000 Professional installation on the company computer to overwrite the file with the same name on my own computer, and then ran Pqmagic again. This time it did indeed run normally. It seemed that the reason Pqmagic could not run normally lay in the contents of the Boot.ini file. So I compared the Boot.ini files from the two versions. There were a total of two differences: the Windows 2000 version names (“Advanced Server” and “Professional”). I wondered whether Pqmagic was using this difference in the Boot.ini file to determine the version of Windows 2000 and decide whether or not to run. So I changed “Advanced Server” in the Server edition Boot.ini file to “Professional,” but Pqmagic still would not run. Finally I found that in the Professional edition there was one space before and after the “=”, while in the Server edition there were no spaces. So I added these two spaces in the Server edition's Boot.ini file, and then ran Pqmagic again. This time that error message finally did not appear.

　　To verify this conclusion again, I deleted Windows 2000 Professional and installed the Server edition again, then modified the Boot.ini file using the method above. After the modification, it did not affect the running of Windows 2000 at all, and Pqmagic could also be used normally. It seems the problem was thus perfectly solved. As for why this interesting problem appeared, I guess Microsoft deliberately left this mark in order to distinguish the Professional edition from the Server edition, and Pqmagic uses this mark to keep itself from running under the Server edition. This may be a way to ensure the stable operation of the Server edition.

Originally posted by pfox at 2003-11-27 12:00 AM:
The server edition of pq.