Trying to go back to Windows XP from Xubuntu
 

Please this is an urgent! My friend let me borrow his laptop and I installed Xubuntu on it and cleared his XP hardrive. Now he needs it back, and I can't install Windows XP on it. Can someone please help me?

I am sorry to be a bother but its urgent!

Are you able to boot into xbuntu? Did you install xbuntu to the same partition as xp? Why can't you re-install xp on it? If you cana boot xbuntu run the command as root user: fdisk -l (lower-case letter L, not a one (1) and post it here.

post # fdisk -l
to give us enough information, since you do not give enough... where si the problem.

Well, at least you didn't put "urgent' in the title....;)

What happens when you attempt to install XP?

He got really mad at me!!!!!!! But he left to go on a trip so I have a little more time. I have been looking everywhere, but can't find the answer so i will sttart answering what you guys asked me.

Before when I tried to install Windows XP on the Xubuntu it would give me the BSOD when it tells you to restart and get into a normal installation Window. I am assuming this is after the hardrive formats. Now I reinstalled Xubuntu, but i can't even load it. His laptop just turns on an gives a blinking cursor, what should I do???

I appreciate your help

"Before when I tried to install Windows XP on the Xubuntu it would give me the BSOD"

It sounds like you might have changed the BIOS settings. Make sure the boot order is HD1, then CDROM. Because of that, you also have to make sure that HD1 is not bootable before you begin...

First, you would not "install Windows XP on the Xubuntu". A normal install of Windows will take the whole disk and Xubuntu will be gone. To get the Windows installer to work, it is sometimes necessary to erase part of the disk--namely the 1st sector which contains boot code and the primary partition table. There are many tools for this, including "dd", which will be available on any "Live CD" Linux disk.
One way to go:
Boot up you Linux CD and get into a terminal (from the menus, or by doing ctrl-alt-F1) Enter these commands:
fdisk -l (tells us what your drive and partitions are--lets assume the drive is /dev/sda)
dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda bs=512 count=1 (erases the 1st sector)

Now reboot using the Windows install disk and see if you can install Windows. If not, tell us exactly what happens--error mesages, etc.

I would say the opposite: Set the BIOS to boot the CD first, then the HD. If there is no CD in the drive, then it goes to the HD.

I am having a similar problem. I had successfully set up a dual boot w/ WindowsXP and Ubuntu and then thought I would install Fedora 9 in place of Ubuntu. The install seemed ok and then it wouldn't boot up after the 1st reboot. I saw "GRUB" come up after the BIOS hardware listing but then it would just reboot and show "GRUB" again. I tried using the WindowsXP recovery console and typing FIXMBR and FIXBOOT neither of which worked. I then tried reinstalling WindowsXP but was getting a disk read error. I think that when I installed Fedora it may have recognized the RAID capability of the 2 SATA drives and caused some kind of a problem there as the drives were listed differently than what I would have expected. They were listed as nvidia/mapper/ and something else I can't remember. I am used to them being listed as hda or sda. I am at work now but will try again tonight to reinstall WindowsXP as I was able to get Ubuntu to install to hda where I couldn't get XP to install back since this began. I will post my results when I get some.

Well a fresh install of XP was now successful. I don't know why it wasn't working the last couple of times but it worked now. I was about to try installing SuSE 10.3 again but it still looks like it is trying to use RAID partitioning on my drives. Guess I'll have to manually configure the partitioning.

Woohoo I realized ehy nothing would load, the hard drive was moved! Any ways I did what pixellany said and here is what happened:

Usage: fdisk [-l] [-b SSZ] [-u] device
E.g.: fdisk /dev/hda (for the first IDE disk)
or: fdisk /dev/sdc (for the third SCSI disk)
or: fdisk /dev/eda (for the first PS/2 ESDI drive)
or: fdisk /dev/rd/c0d0 or: fdisk /dev/ida/c0d0 (for RAID devices)

ubuntu@ubuntu:~$ fdisk -l
ubuntu@ubuntu:~$ sudo fdisk -l
ubuntu@ubuntu:~$ sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda bs=512 count=1
dd: writing `/dev/sda': Input/output error
1+0 records in
0+0 records out
0 bytes (0 B) copied, 0.00210737 seconds, 0.0 kB/s

Is this good, if it is should I go ahead and install XP?

Thank you for all of yuor help.

I tried that dd command from the HD and here is what came up:

tsevy@tsevy-laptop:~$ sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda1 bs=512 count=1
1+0 records in
1+0 records out
512 bytes (512 B) copied, 5.4452e-05 seconds, 9.4 MB/s

Please guys, I really need this done. Is there a way and what must I do????

I appreciate any help at all

Are you using a windows xp full install cd? An upgrade or maintenance disk won't work if you have wiped or overwritten the original xp partition.

again, post the output of:
sudo fdisk -l

Yeah... take it to your local electronics store. Their "Geek Squad" will charge you about $400 for a nice new copy of Vista (they can't sell anything else) and the labor to get the computer working again. But they will guarantee the work.

Call it an act of penance.

In the box of the laptop, when you buy a new laptop, there is normally few cds and dvds. One is the system recovery. It is a ghost or powerquest image, images of the operating system. If you have those disks, that may maybe work. Otherwise, there is always some guys that have same model ...
(trying to help)

Oskar, should I post that from the Live CD or the actual install on the HD?

It doesn't matter, as both will give the same information.

If you erased the MBR, try installing XP. As the old saying goes: "If it works, it's OK."

Bad move. Bad, bad move. And Pixellany should have known better than to give that advice; you could be in real trouble now. Pixellany needs to be taken out behind the woodshed for that advice.

However, if you executed the command exactly as you wrote it here, you are OK because you overwrote the first block of hda1 rather than the first block (the MBR) of hda.

If, on the other hand, you executed this command against hda rather than hda1, you have wiped out the drive partition table, and more than likely that drive contains a hidden partition with the XP repair installation on it.

The command you SHOULD HAVE executed was this one:

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda bs=446 count=1.

The boot loader code is fully contained in the first 446 bytes of the MBR; the balance of the MBR is the partition table and the "magic number".

If you actually did that, run a Linux Live CD (such as Knoppix) which has a copy of testdisk on it, and try to recover the partition table.

Touche.....

I am not used to having any computer where you cannot re-install the OS no matter what. (eg if there was a "hard crash" of the hard disk.)
If I am not mistaken, there is always a way of getting XP re-installed as long as you have the license.

Ok, let me brief you guys on what happened, I read that I can use Win 98 CD to uninstall with the fdisk, and what do you know, it deleted the lInux partitions. Now when i run the XP install CD or the 98 install CD it says ti cant find the hardrives. SO I thought maybe I could go back in linux, but noooo, When i run the linux install cd it just sits a a messed up screen after everything loads from the CD.

Does anyone know how it can find the HD?

That's a whole different problem. Enter the bios while it boots up, and check if the bios recognizes the harddrive... some will show it during boot up, and you will just have to press pause, so you see it. usually you can enter the bios by pressing del or F1 a few seconds after you pressed the power button.

Can You tell me what kind of Laptop that u use?, series, product id etc,
Seems that your problem is the Hardware not Windows or Linux Problem.