My pc has had no problems up to date. I had some extra unpartitioned space on the slave drive and figured id install linux. I installed fedora core. When i start up, i get the GRUB (linux) boot loader. Shows the two operating systems available. Fedora core boots fine, but when i select windows xp, the system restarts. What is going on here?

More details would help, thats all rather sketchy Pentium 4 3.2Ghz 2048mb DDR2 Ram GeForce 7800GT Windows XP Professional SP2

believe it was fedore core version 2, (aka red hat 11). i installed windows first, linux second. i just put a new slave drive in last week, 250G. i have an 80G master drive. the 80 gb contains my windows info. I split the 250 into 2 partitions originally. one is 200G and is for mp3s and videos, NTFS. the second is a 10G for documents. i left space unpartitioned, so idecided to install linux. I made a /boot partition, mounted it at /boot and a root partition, mounted at / . I put the loader on the MBR (master boot record). I diddnt make a linux swap partition because even though i had plenty of space, it wouldnt let me for some reason. now only linux will boot, if i select XP it restarts the pc.

I suspect that Grub does not load all the drivers needed to start XP from the bootmenu and it overwrites the original mbr so that only Linux starts. I had the same problem and I beleive a boot manager is the only way to overcome this dual boot problem. I gave up eventually and now use Linux in a separate mountable bootcaddy. Try the Linux forum on the left of this page... the experts there are pretty good. Once I thought I was wrong, now I'm not so sure!