I tried installing Arch Linux for the second time. I've never had problems with Linux before, or atleast major problems. I got the partition working, and it worked, or it didn't, and reinstalled Windows.

I followed http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/..._Install_Guide both times, Everything went fine, no odd messages, no obstructing errors.

I did an MD5 check both times, and they were good.

My guess is it's the boot loader. This time, I did the auto-prepare for the hard drive, and choose GRUB as my boot loader, and had it go to the default place, which apparently wasn't correct.

My situation as of now? I am stuck at the first boot screen, where it says to press F2 for Boot, and F10 for BIOS, but I can't get there. If I unplug my IDE Harddrive, I can, which is how I've been able to boot to a CD, and use a LiveCD like this, Xubuntu, or get back to the Arch screen.

Now, if I fdisk /dev/hda, it says it doesn't exist. When I fdisk /dev/hdc it does, but it says there are no partitions. When I remember after doing auto-prepare, checking it out under manual, that all three partitions were there. I tried getting help in the Arch IRC Chat, but didn't get it fixed, and basically found out that /dev/hdc is read-only.

When FDisking, all that seems to work is:

Code:
fdisk -l /dev/hdc
And I get this message:

Code:
"Note: sector size is 2048 (not 512)

Disk /dev/hdc: 7740 MB, 7740522496 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 235 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 2048 = 32901120 bytes

Disk /dev/hdc doesn't contain a valid partition table"
When I do:

Code:
cfdisk /dev/hdc
(Which is the only working one again) I get a message saying it's read only, I do not have permission to write to it. Inside, it has no partitions, only one of type Pri/Log and Free Space. What concerns me, is that it says the disk has 7,740 MB. This is an 80 GB drive, so it's missing another digit there.

Also incase it matters:

"ls /dev/hd*"
/dev/hdc /dev/hdd

"ls /dev/sd*"
ls: /dev/sd*: No such file or directory

I also ran

Code:
dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/HD count=1 bs=512
and got

Code:
1+0 records in
1+0 records out
512 bytes (512 B) copied, 5e-05 seconds, 10 MB/s
(I'm posting updates about what others have recommended doing, hopefully giving you ideas about what's wrong)