I've had this problem both when I tried to install Red Hat 9 and when I tried to install Fedora Core 2... I'm unable to boot my windows partition or even reinstall on it and there is a small partition of about 1mb at the start of the drive... any idea how to remove this?

Are you currently able to boot into linux?

I was able to boot into linux ok. With Red Hat 9.0 I couldn't get my video card working or my LAN or modem (conexant... i'm aware of the problem with this), so I freaked out with no internet access and did a low level format and everything was ok.

When I installed Fedora it wouldn't load the xwindow system.... so again I freaked out with only a comand line to work with. But this time I borrowed a small hard drive a friend had laying around so I could install XP and at least get access to my backup partition.

I had a problem installing mandrake 9.2 and 10.0 where I was getting an error msg:

Could not uncompress second stage ramdisk. This is probably due to a hardware error while reading the data. (This could be caused by a hardware failure or a linux kernel bug)

So I'm thinking it's BIOS related somehow both times during the installation I got an error that mentioned the BIOS. I've had a problem ever since I first tried Red Hat that everytime I touch anything in the BIOS my pc boots up as XP1400+ instead of XP2500+ and the only way to fix it is to flash the BIOS... which I'm not keen to do.

Sorry for not replying sooner.
Perhaps you need to turn off "PNP" (plug and play) in your bios.

all working now... either dodgy burn or hard drive not set to LBA (think it was both)

Very good.