HELP ME! I recently had tried to install RED HAT LINUX on this computer of mine with extra hard drive space that had not been partitioned/formatted. I installed linux and then it must have failed somehow because every time I tried to boot it froze after saying Verifying Pool Data... LI I am so mad and upset right now because I went into FDISK (like the Red Hat Manual Said I should) and deleted the partitions and the manual said it'd boot like it did before I tried to install linux. Well it doesn't. I WANT WINDOWS XP TO BOOT LIKE IT DID BEFORE! Not even the DOS files said there was a partition on my drive. I have a 200 GB Drive and it said there was only 55 gigs (about how much I didn't format for XP) in FDISK. Where'd everything else go?! How the heck do I get it back?!?! HELP ME PLEASE I NEED MY COMPUTER AND I REALLY NEED IT NOW! ~Wes~

WesleyJTay, fdisk=format=erase all (X P included). Linux likes to do that just to be sure. More than 1 OS on the same partition creates confusion. You can have both so long as they live on seperate partitions. Sounds like your original configuration was just 1 large partition. What to do about it? Dunno. HTH. Ed in Texas.

WesleyJTay, fdisk=format=erase all (X P included). Linux likes to do that just to be sure. More than 1 OS on the same partition creates confusion. You can have both so long as they live on seperate partitions. Sounds like your original configuration was just 1 large partition. What to do about it? Dunno. Reinstall Linux? HTH. Ed in Texas.

XP installed initially in its own (separate) partition; did Linux go into its own (separate) partition?

You get only "LI" if you are using LILO as your boot loader and it fails to load. LILO resides in the MBR (Master Boot Record) of the hard drive. If Windows XP is still intact you should be able to boot to it again if you restore the MBR to its original state. If you have an XP boot disk then you can use the recovery mode to fix that. From the recovery mode command line use the command FIXMBR to restore the MBR. Since you using LILO you must be using an old version of RedHat. There are many reasons why an installation would fail. On some computer installing the linux /boot partition beyond about 8GB could cause this. Older LILOs would hang if Linux was installed on anything other than the first hard drive. Many of these limitations have been removed or made less troublesome on current versions of RedHat and Fedora which have dropped LILO in favor of GRUB. By the way the last RedHat version was version 9. There will be no more desktop versions of RedHat after that. RedHat desktop development was taken over by the Fedora project which is up to version 3 (aka Core 3) now. Their web site is: http://fedora.redhat.com/

Very nice answer egkenny!!! You sound like you have been through it a time or two. Good Job!