Im currently experiencing serious problems with my laptop. It came preloaded with Windows XP. I would like to format the hard drive so I can replace the OS with Linux (redhat 9). Im sick of windows! Every website I come across though gives instructions assuming you have floppy disks, there is no floppy drive on this computer, and also assume you have spare XP installation disks, I have none, as mentioned earlier, the computer came with XP already installed. I am going to cry Can anyone help me by giving me instructions to format my hard drive so I can instal linux? thank you

You can use the install cd of redhat 9 to format it. Just let redhat do its job. It will explain every step of the install process thoroughly, and you´ll know when it will write changes to disk.
So: you don´t need the xp cd.

If you live in a city or town with a Linux Users' Group, you might want to take your laptop to one of their Install Fests, where users who know the ins and outs of Linux will help newcomers get started, and install Linux for them. Sometimes Linux is not as easy to install on a laptop as on a desktop computer.

You can probably just boot from the Red Hat 9 CD-ROM and follow instructions from there and it will take care of formatting and partioning for you--according to what you tell the installer program.

Unsure why you chose Red Hat 9, as Red Hat is no longer a "consumer" distribution but targeted at commerce--the consumer version is called Fedora now.

I'm just worried that you might get started installing Linux and come up against a brick wall so to speak... Which would be even less fun than using Windows.

thanks guys

Actually, I know quite a lot of users that prefer and continue to use RH9. As most have found, Fedora claims to be "Bleeding edge" but you will also find that features that worked great in RH9 just plain stopped working with Fedora. The prob w/ Fedora IMHO is that each core release is distributed with technologies that do not work. The users get them to work, and RH rolls it into their enterprise edition and release a new core version with new problems for us to address. Good for RH, bad for the common user.

This certainly makes sense. I had the same experience with Mandrake 10.0. I went back to 9.2 within an hour! Things that worked just fine in 9.2 stopped working altogether or were screwed up in 10.0.

I like 9.2. My display looks better than Windows ever did, everything works MUCH faster, and of course there's the legendary Linux stability, which is no exaggeration.

I started with Mandrake 8.0 in January 2003 and every release since was an improvement till 10.0. I intend to try 10.1 soon--it's said to be much improved.

Im cant get the computer to boot from the cd-rom drive even though I chose that as the 1st option in the bios. I think its reading the cd-rom drive first but then just skips over anything in it. I also tried installing windows 2000 jus tto see and it was the same story. I have xp currnetly and hate it. Ive been infected with virus after virus and i tierd of it. i just want xp gone and off this computer for good....seems like it doesnt want to go away

Maybe if you hold an exorcism?

I wonder if this would help narrow down the problem: my computer BIOS allows setting a list of three choices for booting (if no. 1 doesn't work, it tries no. 2, and if that fails, it goes to the final choice). What if you set each of those three (assuming you have this kind of setup, too) to the CD-ROM drive? Then if it skipped the CD-ROM and booted from the hard drive, it would appear something pretty fundamental is wrong.

At least it would be worth a try...

Make sure to check out this website:

Linux on Laptops

Good luck!

what kind of laptop are you trying to install RH9 on?

FC = the devil. It almost made me lose 5 years of my music production data when I tried to make it dual boot.

How did it make you lose your back ups? Does Fedora really have the ability to affect things not on your computer? I would really like an answer to this because I was thinking of buying a laptop this week and trying it out but if it is going to delete all my back up CDs if the install fails I will try another distro.

You said: How did it make you lose your back ups? Does Fedora really have the ability to affect things not on your computer?


Where in the message does it say he lost his backups?
Re-read the postings

couldve been using FC 2. There's some kind of glitch when it writes to the MBR and suddenly you cant boot in XP. If that does happen you can always put the XP CD back in and fix the MBR. There is a fix for that issue though.