hello every one

I wanted to install dual system (xp,red hat 5) on my laptop so i installed red hat enterprise 5 and the whole hard disk become a partition for Linux after that i discovered i must install windows first (this the first time i deal with Linux)

so now i want uninstall red hat 5 and install windows then red hat 5 but i cant

i tried to boot from windows but it doesn't understand the partition table i think it just goes black without doing anything i cant even reach the level of the first welcome screen

i try to boot from red hat Dvd and type commands like fdisk but it says kernel cant find image

so what can i do

i don't have a bootable Cd with partition magic on it and i don't have a floppy drive to make rescue disks if that's what you gonna advice

please help

thanks

This is not urgent for anyone of our members, so please do not mark it as such. instead you should have used in intelligent and informative thread titles which actually gives a clue as to what you're having issues with.

Nope...not urgent for me. Please take acid_kewpie's comment to heart.


What you can do is simple...get your Windows CD/DVD and boot from it. Do a fresh, clean install of Windows. Then load Linux.

Anything else we can help you with?

Burn a copy of Parted Magic or GPartedLiveCd and see if you can pick up your partition. Did you run the command fdisk -l as root?

Try to edit your post to change its title from "urgent" to something more descriptive of the problem, and therefore more encouraging of a reply.

When you boot from the DVD you are normally given an option to select a boot option. If one of those options is something like "rescue an installed system," select that. If not, enter the command "linux rescue" as the boot option.

If you get the "unable to find an image" message after the DVD boots, then just ignore it. If it happens as the DVD is booting, you've got a bad DVD. (Since you're going to blow away the RH 5 installation, you don't care if the DVD can't find a boot image on the HD.)

If the "rescue" mode offers to mount your RH drive, don't do it. You're going in to "rescue" to change the partition table on the drive, and the drive can't be mounted when you do that.

At this point you should be logged in as "root" from the DVD. So all you need to do is free all the partitions on the HD. (If there are no partitions defined on the HD, XP should treat it like a new drive when you install XP.)

To free the partitions, enter the command "parted /dev/sda" to start the partition editor on the first ("a") hard drive.
At the next prompt, you can enter "help" to see a list of available commands.

Specifically, "print" should list the partitions on the drive, and "rm <number>" should remove a partition.

Remove all partition on the drive, save the changes, and reboot with the XP install disk in the drive and you should be "golden."

P.S.: You'll keep Chris happier if you follow the posting guidelines in the future. And also avoid double posts.

I'll reiterate the same advice: Use a meaningful title. I typically skip non-informative "Please Help" or "Urgent" articles.

That said, if you're seeing black screen just after the "Setup is inspecting your computer..." then you've had the [mis]fortune of Micro$oft's attempt to get you to disable your Linux Partitions.

If the following doesn't work, download a LiveCD and use it, since I haven't used RH for years. But if they operate as they used to:
- Boot to the RH5 DVD,
- Tell it language, keyboard, etc., BUT...
- When it offers installation options (fresh, etc.), STOP.
- Press Ctrl-Alt-F2 (or Ctrl-Alt-F1, -F3, can't recall) to get a shell prompt.
- Run "fdisk /dev/hda" or "fdisk /dev/sda".

Delete the partitions in the partition table, and then WXP should install okay.

Hope that helps.