I have a Dell Inspiron 8600 laptop. I am operating on WinXP service pack 2.

I just purchased the Iomega External 500GB hard drive. In addition to the drive, I purchased Norton "Partition Magic" version 8.0. When I tried setting up 4 partitions on the external drive using Partition Magic, the program goes into DOS mode and I get the following message "Error 626: Operation is to be performed on a hard drive not visible from boot-mode."

The symantec web site specifies:
This message can occur if you are attempting to perform an operation on a drive that Microsoft® Windows® detects as a fixed drive but which DOS does detect at all. This most often happens with USB, FireWire or PCMCIA hard drives. Because Symantec imaging software must boot to a DOS environment to perform some operations, these programs may not be able to perform operations on these types of drives in a DOS environment.

Help!!! How can I get DOS to recognize my external drive. How do I get "Partition Magic" to work correctly?

Suggest you forget about the Norton "Partition Magic" and just use Windows XP to partition and format the external drive.