i currently have fedora core 5 (linux) running on my computer.

i installed it 2 months ago because i was taking a course on it and was trying to familiarize myself with it.. well now i am done the course and i want to put xp back onto my laptop. so i put in the cd and reboot (bios set to start from cd drive) it loads up and then says "press any key to boot from cd" so i hit a key and the next screen comes up "setup is inspecting your computer's hardware configuration" after that i hear the cd drive stop spinning, and the screen is left black....nothing happens after this except that i can hear my cd drive scanning for like 2 seconds every few minutes....


any suggestions?

Try a different Windows CD. Anything that Fedora has on there should not prevent the Windows CD from loading. If it a recovery disk and not a full Windows disk you may need to fdisk the drive and put a NTFS partition on it. What type of laptop is it? It may also be looking for a recovery partition that you may have wiped when you installed Fedora.

Download a different Windows distro and try that.

Or restore the backup you made before you install fedora. You did make a backup, didn't you?

i did make a backup. but apparently its been corrupted..... so it seems the only way is to reinstall completely unfortunatly...

btw it is not a recovery disk it is a windows xp profesional full install

Try using a partition utility to delete all of your linux partitions. Windows should install to an empty disk just fine. You could also put an NTFS or FAT partition on there if you want.

I always wipe a drive clean before I change OS.

You can issue that from any live CD or Linux-BSD recovery disk. That will zero out the whole disk.

Substitute your own parameters