I'm having a rather bizzare problem. I installed Fedora Core 5 on the primary partition of my laptop. I then installed Windows XP Professional on the second partition (the third partition is a swap partition). However, after installing Windows, GRUB no longer came up. I then used Diskpart from the Windows command prompt to mark my linux partition as active. This failed, and I had to repair my Windows installation to get anything to boot.

Now, when I installed GRUB (using the GRUB-Windows installer), it doesn't recognize my linux partition. Also when I try to update the partition using my Fedora DVD it says that the filesystem is NFTS, yet I never reformated the partition, and both the Windows device manager and the MBR say that the filesystem is still ext3. I'm rather confused, and I really don't want to have to reformat my linux partition. Any ideas about what could be going on?

I've done a little more looking into this, and it seems that one of the problems is an inability to mount the partition (or so says GParted). I don't know if this extra info helps or not...

It sounds like the Windows installation modified the disk's partition table. Since Windows doesn't know about ext2 or Reiserfs or whatever it probably created a setting that it knows. You might be able to fix this by booting a live CD and using fdisk to change the partition type of the Linux partition.

Generally you don't want to install Windows on a disk that already has a different operating system such as Linux. The Windows installer has no interest in cooperating with other operating systems so there isn't any code in the Windows installer to preserve whatever else is there. Since the Linux installers have always been designed to dual boot with Windows they will create a disk partition table with cooperation with Windows in mind.

Again, generally, you don't want to have Linux and Windows on the same disk. You can create problems if you use the Windows disk administrator to change the disk to a dynamic volume or any other special Windows disk settings.

Disks are affordable enough that, if you have room in your computer, it is easier all around to have one disk for Windows and another disk for Linux.