I don't know what went wrong about the extended partition because, as I said, when I installed Ubuntu, I had just primary partitions: hda1, hda2 and hda3! Go figure...

What caused all this mess? Was it the uninstallation of the old kernel from the synaptic manager as the other person said? Should I, like he/she told, and only uninstall old kernels from the terminal?

I also have another question: what can I do so that Windows XP is at the second line from the grub menu (so that I have Ubuntu in the top and I only have to click "down" once to get to Windows XP)? Maybe the fact that I altered this order in menu.lst in the beggining of this mess made it worse... I don't know. Do you?

anyway, how do i make like you said an extended partition?

I don't know what caused the mess. I see no way that hda1 could have gone from a primary partition to an extended partition, while leaving the ntfs partition mountable at all. I think that somehow at the beginning of your install you made a mistake, and your XP has been residing on an extended partition. I have been googling this a bit and I do believe that it is possible to make XP boot from an extended partition, but the way it is done will probably confuse a lot of the automated tools that mess with boot sectors and partition tables.

Therefore I think you were OK until you installed kubuntu. Then you got bitten by some of the automatic tools.

What I was going to do was take you through a procedure that would involve first imaging the XP installation then reformatting hda1 as a primary partition, then copying XP back, then modifying the XP partition boot record so that it would know it now was on a primary partition. This would involve some more hex editing.

Doing a clean install is simpler and might even be quicker.

when you are ready to start reinstalling, you should start by reformatting the disk because you want that extended partition at the beginning to go away. The XP installer will define a primary partition for you.

A final comment: you don't need a FAT partition to transfer/share data. nfts-3g for linux permits writing to ntfs and if you, like me, don't trust that then you can install the ext3 filesystem on Windows and just read/write linux partitions as if they were windows partitions.

Go here to get the filesystem:
http://www.fs-driver.org/

I have uninstalled kubuntu old kernels from synaptic without trouble. I don't *think* that this caused your problem, and any problem it did cause should have only affected linux.

cut/paste the text from where it is to where you want it in menu.lst.

Changing the order wouldn't do it, unless you didn't move ALL the lines that go with the particular OS.

What actually made your XP partition unmountable was hiding hda1. Bad move.

If you had earlier been booting into XP, then you must have been successfully booting into the extended partition.

"install the ext3 filesystem on Windows"?

What do you mean? Is there a way I can see the ubuntu partition inside Windows, is that it!? I have never heard of it!

EDIT

Oh! I hadn't read the link. Well, but I would have to use both ext2/3 on Windows and NTFS-3G on Ubuntu, wouldn't I?

EDIT

Dumb me, I wouldn't need to send files from Ubuntu to Windows XP: just get in Windows XP from Ubuntu... Thanks for the tip!

"cut/paste the text from where it is to where you want it in menu.lst."

"Changing the order wouldn't do it, unless you didn't move ALL the lines that go with the particular OS."

I moved all the lines, but I was wandering if the order of the list in menu.lst could mess with the booting... But if you say so, then, I know that that hasn't to do with these problems...

...

Yes, I booted Windows XP before many times. I booted Windows XP, Ubuntu, Windows XP, Ubuntu and I never had such a problem before. That's why I can't understand how the first partition became magically extended... Because I had created hda1, hda2 and hda3 normally as primary partitions.