You know if it is a XP and hasn't got Service Pack 2 its installer will not be able to see beyond the 137Gb barrier in a hard disk. The hda1 + hda2 definitely took the first 137Gb space.

So could be flogging a dead horse for all we know.

SUCCESS!!

I tried one more time deleting the MBR, and tried starting the Windows installer without rewriting the partition table, and it started up fine! So, I figured that the installer was having issues somehow with the way I was writing the partition table. So I recreated the partition table, but this time labeled the linux partitions "empty" so that the installer would ignore them. The installer booted up fine, so, I used it to format the NTFS partition at the end of my drive. It worked, the installer installed and I had XP working.

When I booted up a Linux LiveCD, though, the partition table had that partition that used to be the third one now listed as the first. So I rewrote the table again making the NTFS partition the third one. The Linux filesystems were now intact and good to go, so I reinstalled grub. Linux booted fine, so I edited grub.conf to add Windows XP to the boot list, as described in the "Dual-Booting Gentoo and Windows" link I posted earlier in the thread. When I tried to boot XP, it didn't work, and I figured because it was trying to access the wrong partition, so I mounted the NTFS partition in Linux and edited boot.ini to make it point to the third partition, and VOILA it works!

Thank you everyone for all your help! I now have a working dual boot of Linux and Windows, and I also know loads more about partitioning and stuff. Thanks!

Great job, eyebrowsoffire!

Okay, this is my EXACT problem and it's been bugging me for a while.
So far I've tried booting a trusty win98 boot disk to fdisk /mbr but no luck there.

How exactly do you go about labeling the linux partitions as empty?

Here is how my partition table looks:If I can get Windows XP installed without removing on the partitions on that disk I'd be a happy man

Cheers,
stu.

Ah ha, cfdisk doesn't actually display all the type codes for partitions. For empty it's '0', I used fdisk instead.

This does work, amazing! I haven't gone through the whole XP install process yet but the CD boots up fine now.

Thanks!

Great to hear you got it working! If you have any issues PM me and maybe I can help.

Bit of an update.
It didn't go as cleanly as it should have. XP messed the partition table up so it now looks a bit more like this:
Free Space (where /boot and swap should be)
Fat 32
Free Space (where the logical partitions should be)

I think at this point I'll just accept defeat and do a fresh install of Windows XP and Fedora Core (in that order ).
If I'd thought to write down where all the partitions start and end before installing XP in the way mentioned above I guess the partition table could have been quite easily restored. Anyway, I have tried a few applications that attempt to make a guess at where the partitions were, but I think that since I've been moving the partitions about so much lately they're not coming up with the best results.

stu.

Oh, that's too bad. Dang, I should have warned you, because that's what happened to mine too, but I just rewrote the partition table since I had a hand-written backup of it.

The only thing I could think of is if maybe you made the first partition significantly larger than you knew it originally was and then perhaps the filesystem would show up if you booted from a LiveCD. Then you could see the size of the filesystem and resize the partition according to that. If that works, you could do that with both your /boot and swap partitions. And if you had the rest of the space as one physical volume, you could just make that whole space one "Linux LVM" partition and see if LVM recognizes it. Remember though, even if you get all your partitions and filesystems back, the MBR has been wiped so you're going to have to reinstall your bootloader if you want to use that.

Good luck!

EDIT: Even if you're only able to get your LVM partitions working, at least you can recover your data, so at least give it a shot.