Dual-booting problem
 

Hi fellow Linux users.

First I must say that I am still a newbie (using Linux about 5 - 6 months - on-and-off.) So, please be gentle ...

I bought a laptop - Asus Z92Km. It came with Windows XP Home. I installed Fedora Core 5 in a dual boot configuration. Then I wanted to upgrade my Windows installation from Home to Pro. So, I installed Windows XP Pro first, as recommended, and partitioned my drive (100 GB) to leave about 60% of it free for Linux. Then I installed Fedora Core 5. At first everything worked fine. I was able to dual-boot OK. Then, at some point, it would not boot at all - into either OS. I tried installing Windows XP Pro again by putting in the CD and booting from it. But it would not complete the booting process from the CD. It starts to check the hardware and then ... nothing (yes, I checked and the CD is good - it works on other machines.) I then tried installing Fedora 5 again, and that went fine without any problems. Following that, I tried booting from the Windows XP Pro installation CD again, but no go.

Now, I realize that many of you are probably thinking "so what's the problem, just use Linux". But I need to have Windows installed also because my job involves working with Windows apps.

I cannot figure out why the Windows CD will not recognize the hard drive. Did I screw up something? If so, how do I change it?

Well, if I were you, I would wipe the disk and start over. Generally , its easier to install windbloze first, then install linux.

When you install linux, you installed a boot loader, Grub or Lilo. That re-writes the MBR ( master boot record ). So, since the last install you did was linux, you will not be able to boot windoze from the HD.

I can't think of a good reason why you can not get windbloze CD to boot, unless you have some kind of a hardware issue with the system.

You need to get windbloze installed and working first, then you can try linux again. It is possible to do it the other way around, but it is much more difficult.

Resolve the system not booting from the install CD, install win, and then lin...

Thanks Camorri. I also do not see a reason why it won't boot from the CD. Especially since it boots fine from the Fedora CD (and also from a Suse CD.) So, at present, I am stuck. I cannot boot from the Win CD, and I do not know why.

I was thinking maybe I can get some sort of an independent formatting utility that can recognize and delete Linux partitions. Maybe Windows needs to see either a blank, completely unformatted disk, or a disk that has some sort of a file system it can recognize - FAT, FAT32, NTFS...

Anybody have any other ideas???

Thanks in advance.