I have attempted to dual boot my xp professional machine with gentoo-linux. Got xp running; partitioned for gentoo; got as far as compiling the kernel, and had to stop. I # shutdown - halt the installation (had to sleep). I knew I would have to remount to continue from where I was; no sweat. Well, I went to reboot the machine, I got the Dell logo startup splash and then the message: "Invalid partition table". Yikes!!! I am at a loss as to what to do next. I really need to get back to xp to install vb.net for my programming class, as soon as I am done with my homework I can gentoo to my hearts content. If anyone can help me out I would appreciate it. I am on a Dell machine, pent 4, plenty or ram, and a 40 gig hard drive. I am wondering if I may have come across this problem because I made both my /dev/hda1 and /dev/hda2 both bootable. hda1 being my xp partition. dev/hda2 being my gentoo partition. Thanks a whole bunch.

How can you make two partitions on the same drive bootable? That very well could be the problem, but I was an-aware that was even possible. Linux could care less if the partition is marked bootable so don't worry about that (for instance, on my machine I have no partitions marked bootable....). How did you repartition the disk?

If I remember correctly, I fdisk the drive. I then made the first partition ntfs for xp, then made the next 3 partitions for gentoo. I put in the asterisks to make them both bootable. (did not know that linux did not care if it was a bootable partition or not, but do now.) Gentoo was doing its thing right up to when I had to shutdown -halt the installation. I rebooted this morning and had the error. I have no idea what magic I performed to get both of the partitions to be 'bootable'. I will consult my other buddy that was there helping me install. I am soo lost. I am hoping that I can get back in there and at least get rid of the gentoo partitions until I am done with xp, then attempt a dual boot.

Okay, I was kind of worried when I got that error: Invalid partition table. I popped in the livecd and went back to the partition and removed the boot flag from the gentoo partition. Halted and rebooted without the cd, lo and behold xp started. Hence I am able to respond to this post from home and not from work as I had posted earlier. Thank you for your help. Now I will get my homework done and then find out why I can't boot into Gentoo from the get go.