Greetings. I am having a really hard time with a laptop it's a hp nx6120. Intel Centrino 1.6 Ghz, with 512 MB RAM.

It have debian sarge and windows xp professional. When I try to enter to windows at grub, it reloads the grub again and the x-windows doesn't start at debian. At debian I run df and it doesn't recognize the windows partition (hda1). So I run cfdisk and it sees the ntfs partition and the ntfs partition have a boot flag (wtf?) and the linux partition doesn't have one, so i put the boot flag to the ext3 and eliminate the ntfs one, but when I try to write it gives me an error saying it can't do the operatioin. I also tried to mount the hda1 partition and it tells me the primary boot sector is invalid.

I don't know what to do. Is it the drive? the partition?

And what tool can I use to recover information?. I am downloading knoppix right now for recovery.

Thanks in advanced.