[ILUG] Wandering partition bootable flag

[ollie at eillo.org]

Hello everyone,
                         I have a couple of questions about Vista and dual booting. I installed Arch Linux alongside Vista on my new Dell Vostro laptop. Everything went fine; Vista can be started from grub. 

However every time I restart the laptop the bootable flag seems to have 
wandered from the GRUB partition back to the Vista partition?!?

If I wan to boot Linux again I have to stick in a rescue disk, start 
fdisk and set the GRUB partition as bootable again. 


Has anyone come across this? Is there a fix?

I know I can boot through the windows bootloader but I prefer to go 
straight to GRUB.


Also slightly OT - http://www.bleepingcomputer.com/tutorials/tutorial133.html
describes a handy way to shrink the NTFS partition to make room for Linux. 
Originally Vista had all 160 GB. The above method allowed me to shrink that 
to about 100 GB but refuses to allow me to shrink it any more. 

I’m using about 25 GB of the space available; I have disabled the page file, 
emptied the recycle bin, run that clean up program and defragmented the partition.

Any suggestions?

Regards,
        Oliver.