BOOTING DISASTERS
6/10/08
After six months of hardly touching Linux,
I decided to reclaim my disk space from the Linux
partition I'd created since I ultimately could not get Ubuntu to boot
or to come out of standby consistently on my system, and since
my wife's reaction to Linux was most assuredly negative.  Using 
Partition Magic 8.0, I merged the partition back into my
NTFS partition, but this was an unmitigated disaster, because I
removed the partition with the GRUB loader that Linux had installed,
and immediately afterwards, my computer wouldn't boot!  Word to the
wise:  if this happens to you, put in your XP start-up disk,
go to the command-line
recovery console, type "help," and try the commands that look like
they'll fix the boot.  There are two, and <b>FIXMBR</b> (fix master boot
record) did the trick for me.  Do <i>not</i>, under any circumstances,
select "Repair my XP installation," like I did before I discovered
the FIXMBR command!  This completely trashed my XP installation, reverting
it back to its 2001 state.  It did leave my files and settings and apps
intact, but I had to spend four hours updating XP back to its modern
state--very painful!  A week later, I tried to merge my main boot
partition with another partition (combining two 120 GB partitions
into one 240 GB partition) using Parition Magic&nbsp;8.0, and that
was also very bad.  I had to fix it with the command-line recovery
console again, and it ended up not "taking."  That is, once I finally
got my system to boot again, the partitions hadn't been merged.
I'm not impressed with Partition Magic&nbsp;8.0.  This thing is
supposed to be on its 8th major revision, so you'd think it would
guarantee that your computer could boot after it did its work!