So after a couple of years of using FC1 I thought I'd take my handy new laptop (thank you work!) and put FC4 on it. Here's a long-ish story of my install adventure. If you don't want to read the story, my fatal error is at the bottom, and I'm definitely open to suggestions on how to prevent or fix it! I don't know if I should enter it in bugzilla though: does anyone know what the specific issue is? I tried searching through buzilla but I couldn't find this issue.... Anyways, on with the story : Hardware is an IBM Thinkpad R50p. P4-M, ATI FireGL. 60G hard drive and 2G RAM. Shouldn't be any problems, now should there? Downloaded 4 CD ISOs, installed without any problems, picked my list of applications and installed away. I had a system with my work-provided Windows XP partition that I had resized with a rescue CD and qtparted and was planning on using half the drive for FC4, half for XP. System installed fine, no problems, rebooted, FC4 loaded, everything seemed to work fine, with only two "warnings" : - One of the system startup scripts failed. I couldn't tell which one though because it gave pages of errors. I'll figure it out some day: it didn't seem important to me :) - It went from disk 1 to 2 to 3 to 4, then BACK to disk 2. Why? Why couldn't it install the disk 2 packages (TeX stuff) the first time it was on disk 2? I could live with those though: EVERYTHING else worked perfectly, no problems, no issues. Graphics and sound and everything. I was very happy. So I decided to reboot into windows to see if I had been booked into any meetings in outlook (I know, use evolution, but I had spent a couple of hours by this point, so I thought I should check out windows. Windows started to load (off my grub option) then almost immediately failed and BSOD'd with an error "UNMOUNTABLE_BOOT_VOLUME" http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;297185 documents this error. Rebooting and trying "safe mode with console" showed that it wasn't able to access files off the disk, somehow, while booting (????) I said "OK" and did some more investigating. I tried the following : - Rerun qtparted to delete linux partitions - Rerun linux install without grub - Run Windows XP "Repair Console" It was this last that showed a hint: it saw the disk "C:" as a single partition of 60GB. Not a 30GB partition for Windows XP. So I thought "hey, grub is putting the partition table in a weird state." I reinstalled XP (problem went away) and reinstalled without grub. Same error, repeated. So I did some more investigating and this is my conclusion : PROBLEM: FC4 Disk Druid re-writes the partition table in a format (somehow) that Windows XP can't understand. SOLUTION: Don't use disk druid? (BUT if I don't do this, then how the hell do I install? The automated partition tool won't "automagically" use the existing partitions I created using qtparted. SEVERITY: STUPIDLY high. Completely trashes any XP installation (well, makes the partition table inaccessible to XP, effectively the same thing.) REPRODUCABILITY: Well, I'd really really like NOT to reproduce it, but I can tell in short order if it's messed up. If you know of a tool that will "restore" my partition table to the previous configuration, I'm willing to see if that will let me "fix" the problem if it messes up and run a few tests.... I'm open to suggestion and knowledgable enough to try pretty much anything if you're curious. I just don't happen to have a MBR/ partition table hex editor around (any suggestions? Besides "dd"? :) Thanks for any help or suggestions! Dana Lacoste