Everything is fine with the bootloader and Mandrake hasn't screwed up on me so far but when I try to boot into windows I get a blue screen with an "UNMOUTABLE_BOOT_VOLUME" error message. It said to disable BIOS caching/shadowing but that made no difference. I uninstalled Mandrake but it had no change...then reinstalled it and had no change. What should I do short of deleting the windows partition entirely?

Take a look at this page.

Were you using Lilo or did you try to modify the XP boot.ini?

I was using Lilo. I ran chkdsk and fixboot but now if I boot into windows I get "NTLDR not found" and it hangs there.

OK, this is where it gets tricky. It sounds like you uninstalled Mandrake, but this does not uninstall Lilo. Depending on how you got rid of Mandrake.

The fixboot method did not work.

Assuming that your hard disk did not just decide to go bad in the process, try this.

Get the XP CD out again and try this fix;

"Boot the XP CD and choose to install, when you get to the page, choose R. You can then type fix /mbr This is supposed to rewrite the MBR and put NT's bootloader back in."

Borrowed from here.

If this does not work, then we will try to save your data on the XP drive/partition. You might want to consider repairing the XP installation, as I assume you want to save XP?

After I rewrote the MBR, lilo was gone but I still got the NTLDR error. I then found out that my C:\ partition was "corrupted" beyond repair so I just reformated the whole damn thing and started over. I didn't have a whole lot of important information anyway, but I appreciate the time and effort you spent trying to help a spaz like me :x

The thing I hate most about this is that I installed Mandrake and Win98 on another computer and they work without any confilct! So could it be an XP flaw or was it user error?