Main drive partition reading as "System Reserved" partition

All installed Partition Managers including PW can fail. PW Boot CD will not fail.

True. Maybe i'd best wait until I have the laptop to work with directly. Trouble is I pulled the drive because the laptop it was in wasn't being very reliable either(overheating and such). Hard to say what's better off, here. Potentially failable software on a host machine or a potentially failable laptop.

I first mentioned this when you complained that PW would not install on your XP machine. It's boot disk will work anyway no matter how the HD is connected now. You might need to plug it in directly to mobo (if you have the connector) to get full functionality but I believe a USB connection will work for most functions.

Yes but my XP machine has no monitor/keyboard/mouse, I am only RDPd into it from my workstation, upon which I cannot install PW because its running 2003. These OS-checks are really very infuriating.

Just in passing, I mention that the PW standalone boot CD is a Linux system. There currently is no way to "add drivers" for unsupported devices, such as a 3rd-party USB 3.0 PCIe adapter card.

So if you do have a USB 3.0 adapter you shouldn't connect the external USB drive through it. Remain with the standard USB 2.0 connectors when you're using the PW standalone boot CD.

This is an interesting subject. I just ran into it with Macrium Reflect Free, which has both a Linux and WinPE version of its standalone boot CD. The WinPE version is far more flexible and useful, since it is possible to incorporate "added drivers" manually at boot time of the CD for the "unsupported hardware" in standard WinPE.

I've been so satisfied with the product that I decided to pay what I felt to be a reasonable price for their "Standard" (non-free) version, which enhances the WinPE boot CD construction process to actually incorporate all of your existing drivers (e.g. for this Transcend PDU3 USB 3.0 PCIe adapter) onto the WinPE boot CD when it is created. So when you boot to it, all of your same Win7-supported devices are instantly supported in the standalone environment. No need to manually add drivers at CD boot time, since they're already in that WinPE.

I'd like to see Partition Wizard's standalone boot CD functionality eventually offer the same WinPE option, rather than just the Linux version, for specifically this reason... in order to access USB 3.0 external drives if you have them.

Well I ended up successfully repairing the partitions with PW, so we're back on track with that. Unfortunately the windows instalation is too badly damaged to recover(remember it had a BAD virus infestation) so fortunately the disk is fully readable and I am going to data recover then reformat/reinstall.

Thank you all for the help, especially introducing me to Partition Wizard, it'll be a valuable tool from now on. I'll mark this thread as resolved.