Trouble booting anything, need help with MBR
 

So i've been going several distro's that I've downloaded (slack, mepis, gentoo) only to have some kind of trouble with every one of them. Well, after an unsuccessful 2-day-long gentoo installation (I think i was a little over my head), I just decided to revert back to Mepis. I popped the CD in, ran the installation, supposedly completed installing GRUB to the MBR, everything. I restart without the CD, and my comp tells me that there is a problem with the hard drive boot sector. I used the XP installation CD, went into the recovery console, ran 'fixmbr' and supposedly it worked just fine too. Restart only to get the same error message. I've deleted and repartitioned my hard drive numerous times using Live CDs, but still I cannot figure out what is going on. Currently my hard drive is one big unformatted empty partition. Can anyone help me?

I wish I could tell you what does that every once in a while, I had that happen to me about 6 months ago. fdisk/mbr fixmbr and every other utility I could find to wipe it clean re-formats,partitions and all. The only thing that fixed it was an entire Windows install (there very destructive). After that I reinstalled and everythings ok. just let win run it course fully and you should be ok, I spent more time trying to make sense if it (because it made none) than it took to do that. What I can tell you after MANY distros is Mepis is a very good choice :)

I've encountered something similar. The best bet is to format EVERYTHING, deleting all partition and starting again. You seem to have done this? Then, install Windows like it wants to be intalled (yechh!) then install Linux and make sure you select LBA during the bootloader install. If it still does not work, you may have some unique hardware setup / problem that prohibits you from running Linux along with Windows (although that is highly unlikely / virtually impossible).

Let know how you get on.