Alright. I wiped my hard drive and partition it into two parts. I put mandrake linux 10.1 on one and windows xp on the other. When I installed Xp it noticed linux was on the other partition. It said it had to deactivate it, but that it could be re-activated later when windows was done installing. Do I have to use a boot disk to reactivate linux, or is there another way around? It said there was a way to do it in system tools but I can't seem to find out where.

I also posted it here so others that aren't in tech talk can answer.

The only place it could be in is System Properties - Advanced - Startup And Recovery, otherwise you'll have to follow the instructions I gave in the other thread.

I've never heard of anything non-microsoft showing up in there/in boot.ini by itself, though .

It's really easy to install a bootloader for Linux. All you have to do is get the boot disk for your Linux install, drop it in rescue mode and it will give you directions on how to reinstall the bootloader. I've done it several times and it works quite well.

It probably would be best to leave Windows XP on your active partition.

I ended up wiping the drive, installed Xp, got a copy of partition magic, created another partition on C: and then installed linux. Thank you everyone for the advice though, as I may be using it in the future...