I reinstalled Xp and had a bunch of problems (was using an nlite slipstreamed XP upgrade) but I managed to fix most of them (sound driver problems, icon problems etc.). I am now only left with two pretty serious problems.

One: Xp keeps restarting, without prompts and almost zero errors. I checked my temps which are stable at ~50C on athlon X2. The only kind of warning I get is my dial up disconnecting as windows shuts off

Two: One partition of one of my hard drives (2 drives with 2 partitions each) is not showing up in Computer management>storage>disk management. The space on the hard drive is listed as unpartitioned. That area of the drive IS partitioned though. I know because I needed to load an Ubuntu LiveCD, format the partition with FAT32, then return to windows and format it with NTFS because windows wouldn't format it while it was running (because partition is on same disk as windows install). The weirdest thing is that I can write to the partition but am afraid to use it because of one time it suddenly appeared as RAW file system and I had to reformat. I will see if I can grab a few screenshots.

So I have already posted about this on the MaximumPC forums with little success, but I do not want to retype it so check out

http://www.maximumpc.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=62577

because it pretty much explains everything

If I cannot fix this then then I give up with windows, and dual boot XP and Ubuntu but only use XP for windows exclusive stuff and games. *sigh* I do wish MS could build an easier to fix OS.

I had a thought, and if this is not the problem and it IS window's fault then here I come linux. But what if my PSU is failing, or having trouble. I added the second HD on the same SATA power cable as the first which could induce load problems. I will check with another cable.