I installed Vista Ultimate 64 on a dual partition, the installation was good and Vista was working very well. I then attempted to install Linux on the second partition, however Linux didn't start the intall in the second partition, it attempted to install into the Vista partition. This eliminated the drivers and Vista won't boot. I attempted to repair this problem with the install disk, however it says there is no hard drive.
I was considering FDISKing the hard drive. I don't know how to get to a DOS prompt though. Does anyone have any ideas about how I can remedy this problem?

Soonermagic wrote:

You shouldn't need to FDISK and I wouldn't recommend it for a Vista install unless all else fails.
Once Linux setup hosed your Vista setup, repair couldn't recognize your setup, hence the warning you got. However, Vista setup should be able to handle this. Start a new install with Vista, when it takes you to the screen with a few install options, there should be a button for either "Advanced" or "Other Options" or something similar on, I believe, the lower right of the screen. Click that and you will see options to delete partitions, create new ones and format.
The partition map that opens will probably show the partition with the broken install as "Unknown" or something similar but it should show something that you can then delete, create a new partition in its place, format and you're good to go.
Michael Solomon

Soonermagic wrote:

Hm. I wasn't there, so I can't be sure about anything, but my guess is that you are misinterpreting what you saw. A linux installer would not attempt to install to an NTFS filesystem it would be impossible. You could, however, tell linux to delete and reformat your Vista partition but I don't think you could do that without even knowing about it.
More likely, linux installed its own boot loader in the master boot record of your hard disk, which erased the Vista boot loader. It's a very common problem and there are too many solutions for me to list them here. But if you are going to be multi-booting *nix and MS operating systems you'd better learn them PDQ ;o)
Google should give you more info than you want to know about it.