Hello, as you may have suspected by me posting I have a problem. I recently tried to double boot with Linux Mandrake but it turns out I didn't know as much as I thought I did. I had to resize my windows partition to have it fit and linux went in fine. After that though when I tried to boot up old windows it just restarted a few seconds in and repeated this. I had to use my system recover and it only gave me the option to format and redo so I lost all my stuff right then. After that though everything is running ****y. By ****y I mean when I scroll its like a slide show and tool bars are turning black along with other small things. So, this is what I would like to do, remove everything, including the linux parition and start over completly. I have been fiddling around with things I have read or felt like trying all day but I nearly lost my system a few times due to constant restarts when trying to boot. I will leave things as is untill I get some responses by people who know what they are doing . Thanks in advance..

Hi, yeah a complete hard drive format sounds the order of the day. I used to use Mandrake Linux 9.1 on the same system that was running Windows 98SE and although I got it to work in the end it took quite a while of tinkering with each OS before they learned to coincide peacefully with each other! Now, you need to delete each of the partitions separately, use your XP set-up disk to delete all your NTFS and Windows partitions, DO NOT delete any "unknown partitions" as these are your Linux partitions and deleting these under XP can really mess things up. Once all XP partitions have been deleted, exit set-up and do the same again using your Linux set-up disk for the remaining partitions and then exit. Your should then have a completely empty hard drive.

At this stage it may be a good idea to use some sort of full surface format software just to make sure your drive is clean. If you have a Maxtor drive this can be downloaded from their website.

Now simply re-install Windows XP (YOU MUST DO XP FIRST BEFORE LINUX) in the usual way except leave enough un-partitioned space on your hard drive for your Linux installation. The problem you encountered was probably caused by Linux's built in partition manager re-sizing your NTFS disk in order to accommodate itself. When you come to install Linux again, just use the "use all available free space" option and then everything should run fine.

Let us know how you get on...