Did not do what I wanted

Here's the background: I had a dual-boot laptop that ran Windows XP and Mandrake Linux. I found that I wasn't using the Mandrake partition much after changing jobs, and further the XP side was getting slower and cruftier (this just seems to happen to Windows over time). I figured I'd do a clean install and just have Windows on the box.

I loaded up the Windows installer and had it wipe the disk and start from scratch...but it died partway into the installation. Repeat...same result. Uh oh. I figured I would go get Partition Magic, which I knew from years past. My thought process was that I could boot into the Partition Magic system, have it format my disk and create a single new partition, then load Windows.

Unfortunately this just did not work. PM would boot, but it would then complain about a bad partition map. This is where I got frustrated. I _KNOW_ the partition map is bad, that's why I bought PM! Just nuke the existing map and build a new one! But PM seemed to think that there was data I wanted to save, which was not the case. I could find no option that said "I don't care about anything on this disk, just wipe it clean." The bad map, btw, is likely a result of the Mandrake install. It created new partitions, which did seem to work, but which caused problems later.

The "documentation" is a joke. You get a little pamphlet that tells you how to install ("Insert CD"). For further documentation you are directed to the web. Considering that this is a product that you will typically be using when you can't or don't want to boot your normal OS, I found that pretty amusing. You really need two computers if you want documentation with the product. I did email tech support and got pretty much zero help. I got responses, but they were just quotes from the online documentation.

Bottom line is that I wasted close to $100 for this (it was only available as a package with Ghost, for which I have no use).