I'm completely new to linux. A professor recommended Fedora 10. I burned the DVD and partitioned my drive w/PM (maybe a mistake), anyway, Fedora booted ok but XP was inop. After days of fiddling with a recovery utility and editing boot.ini, I'm back to XP's former state. I still have the partitions as such:

DELLUTILITY FAT 15.7MB Primary
Local Disk FAT 180.4MB Primary
(*) Unal. 321.MB Primary
LocalDiskC NTFS 30945.5MB Primary
(*) Ext 6691.1MB Primary
LocalDiskC 8E 6691.1MB Logical

After my previous trauma, I'm too scared to go blindly. I know I need to reinstall Fedora and am confused as to which partition to use (8E?) and how to configure /boot or other options in setup. Ideally, I'll point boot.ini to Fedora as well as now default XP, but changing partition numbers there gives errors.

I appreciate any help and then I can ask other stuff once I get this going.

Really, when you're dual booting all you need to do prior to installing any Linux distro is defrag and resize your Windows partition, and leave the rest as unallocated space. Then you can create and format your Linux partitions during the distro's installation.

I would recommend downloading the lastest System Rescue CD. You can use the Fedora DVD if you are comfortable with that.

In either case, you will want to either

• Setup networking and SSH into the machine using PuTTY from another Windows machine or just "ssh" from a Linux machine. Do not forget to run "passwd root" if you are using System Rescue CD before you try to SSH into the machine. Setup networking by running "net-setup eth0", select "My network is wired", and "Use DHCP".

• Insert a thumb drive and mount it. This is trickier for a new user. You can see what device the thumb drive is mapped to by looking at the output of "dmesg". Create a mount point using "mkdir /mnt/thumb". Mount the thumb drive using "mount /dev/sdb1 /mnt/thumb".

Once you have either one of those working, you will want to get the output of "fdisk -l". When we look at that, we will be able to give you much higher quality help. If you are using the thumb drive, redirect the output of "fdisk" to a file on the thumb drive using "fdisk -l > /mnt/thumb/fdisk.txt".

From what you posted, you have a 320 Mb unallocated partition. That's fairly small, but you should be able to fit F10 into it.

When you get to the "Partitioning" place in the install, select the "use unallocated space" option.

But the key is where it asks you "Should the boot loader be installed in the boot sector?" You need to say "Yes," but you will later be shown a list of "Boot options" where one is "Fedora" and the second is "Other." Select the "Other" window and change the text to "Windows." (This is cosmetic only, you could, in fact, have picked "Other" from your boot menu after your first install, and you would have been booting Windows. It was there, but perhaps you did not expect "Windows" to be called "Other," eh?) The check box indicates the "default" OS to boot. If you don't see the OS selection menu when you boot after the install, press the "Escape" key as soon as the BOS finishes the initialization to force it to display. (Sometimes GRUB is installed with the "hidemenu" option turned on which force the default to be taken without showing you the other boot options. If this bothers you, let us know and someone will walk you through editing /boot/grug/grub.conf to fix it.)

Another thing you could try is to burn a copy of the Fedora 10 "Live CD," and boot from it until you're more familiar with Fedora (and Linux).

Note that the suggestion of David1357, above, refers to a Gentoo based CD containing many tools for "fixing" problems with both Linux and Windows systems. It is, in fact, a useful tool to have available when things go wrong. However, in your case, I think your problem was more akin to a slight panic when you thought Windows had disappeared when, in fact, the new, more sophisticated, GRUB boot loader had just been told to call it "Other."

If Fedora does refer to a Windows install as "Other", that is a bit silly. The Ubuntu installer is able to figure out that Windows is installed on another partition and put that in the GRUB boot menu, so it cannot bet that hard. In fact, the Ubuntu installer will put the text from "boot.ini" in the title for the Windows stanza.

I mention this not as a plug for Ubuntu, but as a reprimand for the Fedora maintainers. Listing Windows as "Other" is not very user friendly. In fact, it sounds like something Micro$oft would do.

I appreciate all of everyone's help and suggestions. Actually, prior to my partitioning, when I let Fedora part., it would only allow 3G or such and all I could get was Grub or Bash. I did get the "Other" option which allowed me to go into Windows, but Fedora would only give me these command shells. Size increase was not allowed until I partitioned. Wish me luck as I now try to assimilate and compress your help and reinstall Fedora 10. I'll let you all know how it turns out and thank you all.