unable find volume meets criteria

Hi,
Obviously I was having the same trouble as everyone else... My HDD is 120GB Sata drive, and Vista sees the drive perfectly... Initial parts: Part1: Linux SWAP 1G, Part2: Linux EXT3 15G, Part3: Vista NTFS 30G (end of drive)...active
Now the part 3 is at the end of the drive for a reason... the drive is crap and loaded with bad sectors... luckily I know what parts of the drive are still usuable...
After trying almost EVERYTHING in the thread here I decided to do the *right* thing:
1. started partition magic in dos 2. deleted part 3 3. created new part 3 but now 40962,8MB (+/- 40G) (still on END of drive) 4. made part 3 active... 5. applied, rebooted with Vista dvd...
Hopla... !@#%^&* problem fixed... So the CRITERIA is that your part needs to be round 40Gigs ?!? (No I'm not gonna try and see how small it may be on my system... it's installing already...:)
Hope this helps anyone trying this out
Cheers...