I recently installed Debian 3.0 on an XP Pro machine with a Linux partition created with Partition Magic. When I installed Debian I was given the option to create a boot disk, which was recommended if I planned on dual booting. I created the boot floopy, booted to Debian after installation but was unable to load any gui because hardware (ati video card) not supported? Tried to reboot to XP unsuccessfully. It makes it past POST, looks to floppy, then cd then when it tries to boot from the hard drive stops dead and displays in text: 9A 9A 9A 9A 9A repeatedly 30 or 40 times. I have tried Win XP recovery CD to repair windows installation with no luck, used the partition magic boot disks and verified that all partitions are intact, tried the XP recovery console and checked boot.ini to make sure XP is only OS in .ini file. I used partition magic and re-formatted the linux partition so it is empty at this time. I have my data saved on a separate partition so if i have to re-install windows it's not the end of the world, but I want to avoid that if possible.

boot again to the xp cd, and run the fixmbr command. sounds like the linux install over wrote the Master Boot Record. but i could be wrong.

Looks like the main boot record of your harddisk has to be rewritten. If you still have some DOS disks lying around, this is very simple, start up with dos and give the command: fdisk /mbr I don't know if a XP recovery CD somewhere has the option to restore the MBR as I'm not familiar with that OS. If you can get in a windows-command line you can always try that command. Since you don't have linux installed anymore, if you want to do it from linux you will need to use somekind of rescue CD (Personally I think Knoppix and Gentoo have perfect CD's suitable for rescueing tasks from CD. Any linux distro bootable from CD with the lilo command is sufficient. Just give the command lilo -u /dev/hda (if it's an IDE harddisk) or lilo -u /dev/sda (if it's a SCSI)

Will I be putting the rest of my data on other partitions at risk by overwriting MBR? Windows gives me warnings that data on other partitions may become inaccessable when if attempt this.

As far as my knowledge goes, it shouldn't happen. But I've never tried it, so don't shoot me if you lose important data!! Since rewriting your mbr is the only option there is in getting your harddisk bootable again. (Or adding a second harddrive, if data is of life saving importance) Maybe partition magic has a way of recovering lost partitions? I can imagine that after rewriting the mbr windows could have problems with linux partitions, which filesystems it cann't read. But for windows own partitions, they should make at least SOMETHING work... I'm not going to say that important data should always have a backup outside a computer.

That got me to the windows startup screen, however after that the screen goes blank and hangs. Could there be issues with multiple boot managers causing this? I have Style XP installed which uses a boot manager and if linux uses one as well could that be it?

'hmm sorry about that... At least your system knows how to startup from harddrive again. I don't think that multiple boot managers are causing this, but definately the XP boot files are somehow corrupted. Well, reboot and reinstall are familiar concepts for windows users? Maybe somebody at the XP forum has better idea's?