Ahh, I came home to fix the blue screen of death right after I left work. Indeed, I did look around for solutions in the www, (thank god for message boards) and found one solution exactly like mine. Here. So, the problem turned out to be that when I made Linux partitions on my hard drive, the Partition Magic 8 software “hide” XP boot record so that the attention be turned to Linux. All I had to do is to boot into Linux CD and run fdisk /dev/hda. Press “T” to change the system id on /dev/hda1 which contains the boot record of XP. ID number was 17, stands for hidden, so I changed it to 07, unhide. Then reboot. Bingo, XP is back. Then one of my two logical drives went missing—probably because I messed around with MBR, trying to fix anything without doing the research first—I didn’t have a laptop to help me out, so I didn’t have a much choice. But thank god for Partition Magic 8, it has an ability to “undelete” a partition and rescue that second logical drive. Whew. So, everything’s back to normal. I looked at the partition table and realized that I had not resized the extended NTFS partition and was basically partitioning Linux ONTO NTFS extended partition! So I changed the partition table again. Then, I decided to use fdisk to do the partitions instead of PM8 since it hides the XP without ever letting me know, phfft.

Before I could make my system wet with Gentoo Linux, I had to go meet a friend at 8 pm to discuss rent situation as he was thinking abt moving into the basement room for his summer internship. Time passed away quickly and it’s my bedtime, ugh. Had to put this on hold for next day.