How do I uninstall RedHat Linux Enterprise and install Windows XP?
 

I have a lappy which I bought some 8 months ago. I have got Linux with it and they also gave me the CDs.

Now... I am sick with Linux and want to get back to Windows.

I have bought Windows XP and tried booting the lappy while the XP CD is in.

I have got 'Press any key to boot from this CD...'.

I pressed a key and then it said 'Configuring hardware for the setup'(something like that)...

Then... its disappearing and the screen is going all blank and black. I waited for an hour and got no response.

I did this for about 10 times now and I am becoming much more sicker with Linux.

Please.... Help me out!!

Thank a lot in advance!

It looks like Windows XP does recognize something incorrectly and tries to use the wrong driver for something in your computer. I've got this problem myself. I wasn't able to install XP because it fucks up after trying to detect something.
You can try to mess with the BIOS and desactivate features so Windows detects your hardware correctly, but I was unable to do that myself. As usual, Windows is a black box and doesn't give you any information on what it is trying to do and where it fails.
You have 2 options: do as I did and install windows in a virtual machine, where it detects everything correctly (Vista didn't even install on a virtual machine for me, but XP did), or call Microsoft to fix it.

You need to:

1. Identify all your support chips

2. Install their drivers on a floppy disk (yeah, right) - if you're lucky, the WinDuhs installer will look at USB sticks so you can try your luck with that

3. Somewhere in the installer you are asked if you want to add drivers; select 'yes' and add all the drivers you have collected on a USB stick

why are you sick of linux? what distro do you have installed. linux is much more fun than windows

I think the problem is with file system, Linux will make use of ext2 and ext3 file systems, where as windows will make use of FAT file system.

So,Your linux machine is unable make sense out of files of type FAT file system.
You can do one thing, remove the Hard disk from your laptop, connect your hard disk to a windows machine as a "slave" and format it. Then try installing Windows it should work.

Asad;

If you have difficulties because of the limitations of the Windows installer, why would that make you dislike Linux even more??

The Windows installer will typically not recognize a hard drive which is formatted with some other filesystem. (Linux installers do not have this issue.) You will need to use any one of many utilities to erase the MBR on the drive. Then, the Windows installer will see it as an empty disk. You can use a "LiveCD" version of Linux, or any of the various utility CDs out there.

With respect to drivers, I don't know what will be needed, but you could start with the manufacturer of the computer. You may find that the Windows installer has generic defaults that will at least get you started.**

If you find all of this a bit over your head, I'm sure a good computer shop will be able to install Windows for you.

Good Luck

**This is one of many reasons that Linux is superior to Windows. In many cases, all the drivers you need come with the Linux distribution--or are easily available for download. At this stage, however, this may not help you.

This is true for an installed windows system... But during installation, you can erase any existent partitions, doesn't care about the file system they're carrying...

Calm down man, nothing to deal with linux if windows isn't able to something in your computer. Maybe it's time to start getting sicker with windows?

I don't think it has anything to do with ext2 or linux file system. Indeed, as jf already said, the windows installer is supposed to format the disk and wipe everything out. It does not need to understand what's on it, especially since the hard is not supposed to be formatted when you install windows and can contain random data.
I had the same problem and I even had the hard drive formated with NTFS for windows. It stops while trying to detect hardware. As the screen is going away, I believe it has something to do with the graphic card, or maybe that windows is trying to use an unsupported vga mode (the same thing happened with linux to me, because I put vga=xxx as boot option to try to have a better resolution, but my card didn't support it and the screen went black). The problem is that there is no way you can tell windows to use a vga mode, or to know which vga mode it decides to use according to what it thinks it detects. It does everything on your back and when it fucks, there is no failover mode, no log and you can never be sure what is the problem. Supposing it is the graphic card, maybe if you have a spare one you could try to test with another one? Maybe Windows doesn't support your graphic card and your need to buy another one?
Could you open a terminal in red hat, log in to root and post the output of lspci please? Maybe we can tell which hardware is at fault...

I recommend waiting until OP returns. Based on similar posts, my guess is we may never hear from him again.

Whether or not this person returns ...

First of all, if you want to "try Linux," then by far the best way to do it is with a separate machine. Or, at the very least, a separate hard-drive in the same machine. Hardware is quite inexpensive now.

Second, when you want to cold-replace one operating system with another, most OS-installers will do that successfully if you just boot their CD... but you must bear in mind that an OS-installer is going to try to be reasonably cautious about it. If it sees something that it does not understand (like, "a partitioned hard-drive but with partition-types I don't recognize...") it's probably going to squawk-loudly-and-stop. (After all, "it could be twenty years from now, and this could be a nifty new installation of version n+16 of myself, and I don't want to screw things up royally for my future-self.")

Even so, the OS-installer will provide some tool, accessible from some initial menu, but probably not the menu that is flashing pretty pictures at you and cooing at you, "Click here, gran'ma... just click here." :)

(Every geek has a gran'ma who knows nothing more about computers than the speed-dial of their grandson's phone-number. :D )

By "the CDs" do you mean you have a bootable Linux CD?

With a bootable Linux CD, you could easily use a partitioning program to delete all the partitions on the hard drive, or even use the DD program to trash the mbr, so the Windows installer would think it is seeing a brand new disk drive.

If you do that, and still fail to install Windows, you won't have Linux either until you reinstall it.

As others have mentioned, Windows doesn't give you any hints about what has gone wrong. So all anyone can do is guess and experiment.

It is very unlikely, but not 100% impossible, that the Windows installer is confused by finding Linux installed. If that were the case, then trashing the MBR with DD as described above would fix the problem or just deleting the partitions probably would fix the problem.

You might want to try that (if your installed Linux system is worthless to you even if you fail to install Windows). It probably will make no difference, but it might.

It is very likely that some new feature of the laptop hardware is supported by Linux and Vista, but not supported by XP. Microsoft needs some way to force even intelligent users to migrate from XP to Vista, and they sure can't make Vista good enough that an intelligent user would want to choose it.

If you're lucky, that feature is something that can be turned off in the laptop BIOS. Probably the feature is in the mode of the disk interface and the BIOS might have a choice to operate the disk interface in some lower performance legacy mode.

Maybe the problem feature is covered by some XP driver provided by the laptop manufacturer and/or some update available from Microsoft. As others have mentioned, there might be a way to put that driver on a usb stick and interrupt the Windows installer soon enough that you can get it to use that driver before it gets into trouble. Often that approach isn't possible even if you have found the right driver. Then you need to slipsteam the Windows install CD (on a healthy XP computer, use one of the slipstreaming utilities you can download from various web sites to merge the driver and/or latest service pack into an image of the install CD and write the results back to another CD). That's way off topic for this forum, so read more on any site of forum talking about slipstreaming Windows.

I had a problem like this before. For me it was a BIOS issue. I had to switch the driver for the IDE to AHCI, I may have the letters in the wrong order, mine was set to Linux AHCI. Once I did that it went through np. But from what it wounds like your computer came with Linux installed so it may not be computable to Win XP. I'd check the BIOS for the setting I mentioned or check the manufacturer's website for compatibility information. Also keep in mind what everyone else said about file systems and what not.

cheers