how not to initialize HD

[JB]

Paul Cartwright <ale <at> pcartwright.com> writes:

> ...
Hi Paul,
I reset the thread to the left origin to make it easier to follow now.

I hope you are in a good mood and ready to help us and yourself debug
the problem. We will try to save your Win XP installation, but we can not
promise it to you -:). 
Let me know when you are ready, it should not take long time to arrive at
a reasonable diagnosis.

To restart the debugging process, please give me output for:
# fdisk -l
and output or error message for:
# cfdisk -Ps

Also I need to know what do you use to install your Fedora, version
(this is important: Fedora 12 or 13 ?), live cd ?

In the meantime, please read some newly added comments from Tom and Gregory.

For the record (web-found diagnosis):

# cfdisk -Ps 
FATAL ERROR: Bad primary partition <number>: Partition ends in the final
 partial cylinder

Cause.
The above error message occurs if the existing partitions are not in correct
 layout. cfdisk gives this error message when it detects hard drive partitions
 in bad order or overlapped.

Solution.
To fix the above issue, you should correct the present disk layout. You can
 perform this by removing all the existing partitions and creating new ones.

Stay tuned.
JB