When ever I load linux, either fedora 1 or 2 or mandrake 10 on to the macine to dual boot with windows XP it will boot a few times then once linux is going proiperly and configured XP will come up with a machine check error. Before this happens XP starts to run really slowly and then faults with this error.

The only remedy is to use the repair function on the windows install disk and fixmbr to remove the boot tool. This magically fixes the problem.

If I was really suspicious I would say Windows detects the dual boot and doesnt like it.

My machine is new. It is an AMD 3200+ 64 bit with 512 mb ram abd a radeon 9200 card. It has an 80GB ata hdd with two windows partitions and an 80gb sata drive with a windows partitionand the linux loaded on it. Nothing to outrageos and it isnt overcloecked or anything.

Anyone have any ideas?

I believe it is possible to configure dualboot without overwriting the nt loader on the MBR, have you tried that?

not sure about that, know how to do it?