I have recently purchased a Laptop Lenovo R-61, preinstalled with Visa home edition. I was interested in having Fedora-9 and windows Xp on the Laptop.
I installed fedora by removing vista and then later tried to install XP on it. but after putting XP install CD it checked system and finally gives a message that "Windows did not find any hard disc, press F3 to exit."
the Laptop has one hard disc with partitions as below...
60 GB Primary NTFS bootable Partition number 1.
30 GB Primany ext-3 Linux Partition number -2
5 GB linux swap Partition number -3
20 GB FAT 32 Primary used for share, Partition number-4.

I see GRUB in the MBR.
I have tried following..
1. Removed Linux and tried to install XP but the message remains the same.
2. Re-installed Fedora-9 and tried to install XP then, but againt the message remains the same.

Please help me to install XP. I can format the HDD as there is no data at present.

Thanks in advance.

Rajesh

Go into the BIOS and set the SATA drive from AHCI to compatibility mode. That will allow the XP CD to see the drive. Once XP is loaded and you have all of the drivers installed, you can then re-enable SATA to AHCI mode.

If you have a brand new Lenovo R-61, leave Vista—going down to XP is a waste of time. Use disk management to shrink the NTFS volume---yes, you can do this natively in Vista w/out any additional utilities. Even if you can’t use a gparted live-cd to resize.

Load Fedora 9 and enjoy the dual boot.

Thank you darien for the quick reply.
Unfortunately I have deleted Vista from the machine along with ThinkVantage Access PArtition on the Lenovo Laptop.
I have partitioned the HDD many times so I think it may be difficult to recover that data and Vista.
Can you help in this are also.

kind regards,
Rajesh

you will also need to reinstall grub ,seeing as the xp installer will overwright it in the MBR
and see this how to " HOWTO Reinstall XP Without Destroying Fedora When the XP CD Balks"
http://forums.fedoraforum.org/showthread.php?t=167302