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I rather hope that one of you smart guys and gals out there have come across this problem before and can guide me.

I am running a Pentium 4 Dell at 3gHz with plenty of space on 3 HDs and used to have a Red Hat distro before the inevitable Windows XP crash.

I have reinstalled windows and it is now running as normal, with the boot options giving me only Wondows XP and timing out into XP, but any attempt to run or install Linux fails and simply sits there with the GRUB flashing at me.

Trying to run from cd gives the same result and looking deeper I see that XP is on partion 1 and not on partition 0 where I expected it to be.

Partition 0 has no contents and is 31mb. Adequate I would have thought for a boot program like GRUB.

I can find no software that would absorb this odd partition into the windows partition windows and reassign the partition pointers so that Windows would still start.

It is clear that a reformat and reinstall of Xp would set the score straight but that is such a horrendous task I really want to avoid it if at all possible.

Failing all things, I should be able to run Linux from a CD or DVD and have an ISO of an Ubunto version, I also have Red Hat and now the latest Suzie but nowt runs.

I would apreciate any pointers as to how to overcome this/these problem(s). :-(

Thanks

Chris

I think you're right but I can't tell GRUB where to install itself and it consistently fails.

CDROM boots first and I have managed to get Knoppix to boot from the CDROM but it can't find the mouse or the keyboard so that doesn't get me very far.

"calling Suzie is actually Open Suse"

Yes :-) Sorry! My sex crazed brain added the extra bits.

I shall continue to nibble at the edges.

Thanks for your intervention.

Chris

Thanks for that. Working my way through the copious notes and guides

Chris