Did you get a disk with your SATA drive? I seem to remember helping a friend build a computer with a 10,000RPM Raptor SATA drive and having to hit a button (forget what) during windows install to "install a third party RAID driver"... I can't really remember exact details. Maybe the disk came with the motherboard...
I just remember we needed to do that to get widows install ro recognize the raptor correctly.

Have you had XP installed, and booted into it before you started FC3 install? If so then it would seem that something is getting messed up by fedora's install.

Maybe try booting off of a live CD, or using a third party partition manager, and create all of the partitions first, then install xp, then fedora, and don't let either one of them modify the partition table.

BTW, I've seem to remember always hearing that Windows should be installed first, then Linux, as installing windows after linux will overwrite the MBR and you would have to reinstall your bootloader.

Problem sorted - went out and bought another 160GB hdd, installed Windows XP on that, and Linux on the 300GB. All working now. Sweet... Finally able to play my games!

Thanks again for all the help.

Pete

PS - How good is Wine for playing games? Would it be able to play all the latest ones?

Unless I missed it in this thread, you didn't specify your bootloader.

Are you using grub? I presume you are reaching your bootloader menu and you are having the problem after that?

First of all, forget about installing Linux then Windows; you did it right.

Most likely you aren't properly chain loading the windows bootloader.

If you are using grub, please post the contents of /boot/grub/menu.lst.

If you are using LILO I am less likely to be able to help you.

Dual booting is easiest like this:

1.) Partition the drive.
2.) Install Windows
3.) Install Linux

Never install Linux first. Install Windows first, then, when you install linux, FC3 will detect the Windows partition and automatically configure the grub bootloader for you. (I've done this a million times now). If you install Windows after Linux, Windows will remove grub from the MBR of the drive, and you will have to use fdisk or some other utility to reset the active boot partition back to Linux.

As far as your original problem goes:
UNMOUNTABLE_BOOT_VOLUME is caused because Windows XP doesn't have the proper drivers to access most SATA drives. In fact, with some BIOSes, you have to enable RAID on SATA drives to get them so Windows will boot from them.
The proper way to fix this, is to get your motherboard CD out, find the directory containing the SATA/RAID drivers for Windows XP, and copy them to a 3.5 inch floppy. Then, when you install Windows, it will prompt you to hit F6 if you have SCSI/RAID drivers. Hit F6, insert the disk, and load the drivers.

-Jeremy

Am i too ignorant OR williew some problem with ur suggestion !! if u first install linux first and then windows .. wont it eat up the MBR ... u gotta install windows first and then linux ... and as far as his problem goes .. its coz of SATA ... why did u go for NTFS file system any specific liking ? i guess FAT32 wud have been cool ... i dunno .. this same thing happened with my fren but quite opposite .. FC3 installing disks were not able to detect SATA drives ... to which he found fix by using a compiled kernel ..
i dunno maybe u shud make it FAT32 ...
u can have the grub on floppy for some time n then restore it to mbr

grub-install /dev/fd0

and then after trying ur stuff with windows ... install grub back to MBR by booting into fc3 using the floppy grub ...
and then typing this at shell

grub-install /dev/hda

this will bring back linux n windows again
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