So I downgraded my laptop from Vista to XP a while ago, and to do this, because I had a SATA hard drive, I had to make my own XP CD. All worked out fine, until now. Yesterday I got an error while booting up "Invalid Partition Table" I lost my XP disk I made and the recovery console along with that. I tried using a regular XP disk but it couldn't read my harddrive. I tried reverting completely back to Vista but that wasn't possible either.

So I installed DSL on a flashdrive and am on that just so my computer does more than show a black screen. I found out that the most common diagnosis for this error is that there are 2 partitions active. Is there a way for me to fix this in Linux?

http://www.download.com/UBCD4Win/3000-2086_4-10550208.html

You could give this atry.

That requires the XP CD to get some files like setupreg.hiv. Thanks for trying though bro.

Boot to a Linux live CD, then formatt everything into one large single partition. It should prompt you in the beginning, i'm at work but if you're still have problems i'll find the exact instructions.

You should get your hands on Windows PE (Demonoid is your friend) anyway in Linux there a Partition manager that supports making partitions hidden and active.

You just need to set one of your partition as active and the other one as normal. In Windows you can easily do that with
Computer Management>Disk Management>Select Partition/Mark as Active.