OK, wondering if anyone else has had this problem.

I have an Intel 945GNT (LKR) MOBO, and a 1560 GB Seagate SATA 300 drive. Dual Boot - FC4, WinXP.

I got everything installed, and booted up, but the second time I tried to boot, the MBR seemed to fall off the face of planet earth, and I could only hit Windoze.

I figured out what went wrong, and got it fixed. Originaly, I had it partitioned like this:
25 GB - XP - C:
50 GB - FC4 - /
16 GB - FC4 - SWAP

It works when it's liek this:
150 MB - FC4 - /boot
25 GB - XP - C:
50 GB - FC4 - /


Question: what the heck is going on here?
thanks

You have a stange partitioning scheme. I'm going to guess you didn't install your boot loader, but I'm not a Fedora person and I didn't see how you were booting. Also 16GB is a huge amount of swap on your first round! Do have like 8GB or more of RAM? You shouldn't need to make a separate boot partition as the large disk limitation is long over in terms of where the Linux kernel can be at boot time. Are you using some other boot manager besides Grub or Lilo? Indeed this is strange and I don't see where you solved anything by changing what you did. I would think you would want a swap partition again too as I don't see that in your second scheme.

I'm using GRUB, 4 GB of 667 SDRAM, but I use this box for crunching numbers, so 20 GB total memory isn't that much.

I think that the first partition was going to be booted, no matter what I nor anyone else on earth tried to do about it. I tries several different setups, and this is the only one that actually turn on.

"could only hit Windoze" - what does that mean ???.
a)you still got the grub menu but only the Windoze option worked, or
b)you booted straight to 'doze, and never saw the grub menu.

We'll (hopefully) get to the real problem when we know what's happening.

never saw GRUB.

the "real issue" is that the FC4 install was having problems writing to the MBR - it could only write to the MBR backup. when the MBR was read, there wasn't GRUB there to give me a menu, or to even start Linux, so my computer want on it's merry way, and started off the first sector with the "BOOT" flag as TRUE.

there's your "real issue"