Vista - missing partition

hi, im new.

the other day i wanted to dual boot my Acer laptop. it came with Vista home premium 32bit, and i wanted to use XP as well. but something went wrong with the install and XP didnt work. then the partition that had XP just disappeared. then my D:\ drive disappeared. i used my vista ult. x64 boot disk that i use for my desktop computer and merged the 2 missing partitions and then D:\ came back. then when i booted my laptop up this morning D:\ went missing again! any idea of what is happening?

can anyone help me please?

I dont know a great deal about this but when you installed xp, it deleted the existing boot.ini file on the other partition, and since it didn't install successfully, you were left with none and had to do a fresh install of vista ult 64x..right?

Using vistas great disk manager and partitioner you've joined the partitions..maybe you've done it wrong and it only appeared to have merged the partitions, i would suggest using a partition manager of some sort as vista's one doesnt quite do the trick if your in serious trouble.

Add my msn respawns@hotmail.co.uk if you would like a partition manager including a patch for it.

Good luck in sorting this out, i've installed 4 OS's today and had kinda the same problem.
Never use linux