Machine won't boot!

[JTH]

Yesterday, I used Partition Magic 8.0 to remove a 4gb Linux partition I had been dual-booting with Win XP Home (as I never used Linux) and to give the space back to Linux. The machine re-started and sure enough Windows now read the hard drive as being 4gb bigger.

But when I turned it on again today, after the Asus screen I get a screen of L followed by pairs of nines ("L 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99" etc). It stays there and won't boot up Windows! I am terrified all my data has been lost.

Does anyone have any suggestions? Thank you in advance

[JTH]

I've googled it and it appears that it's actually a Linux error ("L 99 99 99..."). It's probably that an element of Linux must still be in the boot loader, while the rest of the partition is gone. Is there a way to make it boot right into Windows instead of trying to go into Linux first?

When I was dual booting, I used the Lilo boot loader so it probably went into Linux "first" and that probably explains it.