OK, so I just finished a massive upgrade on my computer. Basically the only part that was the same was the DVD drive. So I needed to get 64-bit OSes, Fedora 10 and whatever version of windows. My friend who gave me the copy of windows said that XP has horrible 64-bit support, so he gave me a copy of Vista Ultimate.

When I installed Vista (with SP1), it wiped out my entire hard drive because it refused to be anything but the first partition on the drive. OK, so that didn't really matter much, I had just installed the new Fedora that day.

When I went to install Fedora again today, it installed fine and everything is working on this end. However, now when I try to boot into Vista, all I get is a blinking cursor in the corner of the screen. No keys do anything except Ctrl-Alt-Del, and that's not much use. Apparently Vista doesn't have any kind of "rescue boot" on the DVD.

First, can I get back into Vista without reinstalling it all?
Second, if I do have to reinstall, how should I do it so that I can actually use both systems?

PS I only use windows for games and a couple of sound-editing programs, so no need to tell me to switch entirely to Linux.

What entry do you have for vista in Fedora's /boot/grub/menu.lst?

Perhaps try to change it to:
just a thought.

The Vista DVD should have some sort of recovery mode option on it so if you boot off the DVD you should be able to get back into your installed Vista system -- just make sure that the DVD doesn't suggest formatting your hard drive during the process. The steps you have taken otherwise seem correct, so there shouldn't be any reason for you not to be able to set up a dual boot system. I wonder whether the problem is the setting of the active partition on your single hard drive -- as Windows often insist on it being the active partition as well as the first partition.

the Vista DVD should have some sort of recovery mode option on it so if you boot off the DVD you should be able to get back into your installed Vista system - just make sure that the DVD doesn't suggest formatting your hard drive during the process. The steps you have taken otherwise seem correct, so there shouldn't be any reason for you not to be able to set up a dual boot system.

Thanks! That did it!

I think that if you start the installation process, the MS installer will notice that you have Vista installed and ask you if you want to repair it. That is if editing grub's menu.lst doesn't work. XP had a repair console, but my laptop with Vista didn't come with a MS Vista install disk.

I'd recommend defragging the NTFS partition and then using Vista to resize the partition. Without defragging, it may not let you resize the partition itself as small as you want. I didn't defrag and then resized both Vista and SuSE with gmparted because Vista was too greedy in disk size. I had to perform repairs on both afterwords.

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Edit. Sorry, you posted your success reply as I was posting my post.

Glad to be of help.
Basically, what it did was not trying to boot vista directly but delegating the job to Vista's own bootloader.