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