I had XP pro installed originally. it worked fine.
Foolishly I didn't make any kind of backup before installing Linux over top of XP (didn't think I wanted XP at that point). I then realized that what I needed was dual boot (best of both worlds).

My plan was to install windows xp and after that was working to install linux and a bootloader under the impression that linux was better at working around windows than vice versa.

So I brought out my Win XP pro cd and booted up. "setup is inspecting your hardware configuration" and then it hangs, blank screen. However, Slax, ubuntu, trixbox and UBCD all boot up just fine and identify the HD. Seems like it is the LSI1030 SCSI controller that Windows is having trouble with.

So I grab the SCSI controller driver from the HP site, but that doesn't help because Windows setup never even gets to the F6 prompt for the SCSI driver before it hangs.

Tried various things with FDisk and I now have a 50MB linux boot partition, a 20Gig NTFS partition and a 15Gig Linux partition with nothing on it.

Using the boot floppies for XP pro (6 of them) I Load up and can get into recovery console (not sure what to do there) then I get a "your SIF file is corrupt. press F3 to abort" OK... Thanks.

So I used UBCD and a utility on that to create a boot menu, which allows me to choose WindowsXP (NTLDR missing error) or Linux (blank partition)

So I boot up from win 95 but it can't read the NTFS partition... Or boot the Win XP pro cd....

So I think my only hope is to get Windows booting on the HD in the hopes that I can then launch the CD and HOPE that since it booted from HD it will recognize the scsi driver and complete the install.

Then I can install a suitable linux distro and tweak the bootloader.

I need your advice, how could I go about getting this set up? (no I don't have a spare IDE hard disk I can pop in :-))

I had the same kind of problem before, for some reason windows setup has a problem recognising HD structure if u install only linux on the system (may be something to do with linux HD data structure). u need to format (low level format) the HD with any bootable disk utility program. u can download one from ur HD manufacturer's website or u may use this one http://www.killdisk.com/. I would definately prefer the one from the manufacture.

Please let us know if it worked. thanks

Or DBAN (Darik's boot and nuke)

Yet another example of how poorly designed Windows is. ANY installer should be able to re-format a disk and start over. And you would think that MS would try very hard to make it easy to install Windows after some mis-guided person has attempted to try an inferior OS.....

Thanks, I'll give it a try.
Greg.