just making sure, you are booting to the cd/dvd of windows right?

Well basically the partition was ext3. But it kept telling me that it wasn't and I couldn't boot from it.

You could try booting into linux and running gparted (it should have it) or you can use another partitioning tool. You could try just reformatting and see if it works.

There's a tool called fdisk, it's a command line application and you can us it to edit hte partition table. Find out what ID the partition has and see if that maps to what it is actually formatted to.

hxxp://tldp.org/HOWTO/Partition/fdisk_partitioning.html

Are you sure that the Windows XP CD you are using is an actual Operating System installation CD and not just an installer that was meant to be used to install Windows from a special partition on your hard disk?

Most notebooks no longer come with an OS CD, rather they have a CD or DVD that either has an image of the installation (OS plus all the software bundled with the notebook) or that points to an image that is on another partition of your hard drive.

By formatting the drive you may have inadvertently removed the installation partition.

Just a thought.

Bill

Hi,

I have 4 hard disk partitions in my personal computer previously it was just two partitions now my system runs much faster then with the only two partitions in it.