i'm asking here rather than a windows forum..cause yeah..we all know better. Anyway scenario:
Fedora Core 5 and Vista on a laptop. Everyone boots, grub is happy all is good. I decide I need xp back (wireless support for one of my classes). I use parted in FC5 to rm the Vista partition. I slap in my XP CD reboot..and...nothing.
It says that setup is detecting my hardware,than nada. Black screen. I can soft reboot but it won't come up with the fancy license screen, etc.

I seem to recall I had this issue on my desktop in the same scenario, but to solve it then, I just wiped the entire hard drive. I'm not cool with that, as I don't feel like spending the 2 hours getting FC5 back in the saddle after doing so. Plus the hassle of backing up files, and then realizing I forgot to back something up, etc.

No error message. Solid black screen. I've tried pushing random keys nothing gets rid of it.

I've checked the hard drive, the space was listed as free space. I tried for fun turning it into a fat partition and an ntfs partition, and making it boot, all result in the same thing. A whole lot of nothing.

Thoughts on what is preventing XP from installing here, and can I fix it?

XP's installer is particularly stupid. I've had it fail even trying to install on a clean hard drive. I've had to boot a liveCD, wipe the beginning of the drive (label, partition table, extra sectors used by LVM2) with:

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda bs=512 count=16

In other words, if it won't install, and you have to have it back, you will need to wipe you Linux installation.

My suggestion is spend the time getting your wireless card to work in Linux, and never look back. You can then run WinXP in a virtual machine with VMWare Workstation if you really need it.

The problem is I can likely get it working, but thats not what the instructor wants, and since he controls my grade...there we go
I'm going to have another chat with him, to see if he'll make a concession, but I'm not sure how that will go. The lab portions seem to be built around 2 different PCMCIA cards and windows, I think part of that is the different utilities they have and how they work under windows (where as in linux its essentially all the same).

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda bs=512 count=16

issuing this will pretty much let it install, but will break my partition table? Is there a way to back that up or rebuild it afterwards?

The dd command won't just break the partition table. After the command is run, WinXP will see the drive as uninitialized. It will write a new partition table, and then the installation will write over the data that was there before (Linux). To return to the prior state, you will need to re-install Linux and restore any data.

You might be able to keep your linux even though you issue that "dd..." command.
It's a bit tricky, and I can't guarantee it:
1) Boot into Linux, save the partition disk to a file on USB/floppy/whatever outside your harddrive.
2) Save the partition table in a readable format:
# fdisk /dev/hda > /USBstick/parttable
(that USBstick is mountpoint for external media like USB, floppy etc.)
Also print out the file so you have your partitiontable on a paper. (That's really all that matters, the rest is only for precaution.)
3. Execute the "dd .." command. It will erase the partition table but none of your data.
4. When installing Windows, make sure the C-partition begins after all Linux-partitions! I don't know if this is possible, haven't gone that deep into XP.
If not, you could try to run a live-cd and create a partition for Windows with fdisk - it might work. (Or use something like PartitionMagic on your own risk - it'll probably, but I don't know, destroy your chances to recover Linux.)
The important thing is that Windows doesn't put anything in a space used by Linux-partitions.
When Windows is installed you can boot from live-cd, run
# fdisk /dev/hda
and type in your Linux-partitions.
Start & end-cylinders are important, as well as partitiontype.
You can do this because fdisk for Linux doesn't do anything but change the partitiontable - no data on the drive is touched. All DOS/Windows-based partitioning apps I know about erases data! Don't use any other tool than fdisk for Linux! (Unless you know, of course, of other programs acting the same way.)

Now if this doesn't work, or sounds too tricky/uncertain, here's another idea:
Buy another harddrive, you could set it as Primary master and give it all to Windows, or put it as a slave/secondary drive and give it all to Linux. Create & format partitions and move Linux from first drive to new drive.
You can freely move Linux to other drives & partitions, only remember to change /etc/fstab and /boot/grub/grub.conf
Then set up for dual-boot, there are several ways to do that.
I'll give more info when I know what you choose.
This is a safer way to do it, and it works.
Might take more time, and costs a few bucks, but you're 99% safe.
The first way is faster, not quite safe, cheaper and more educational.

Thanks for the answers guy. I had a chat with my Wireless instructor today. I should be okay, as long as I can get both wireless cards working in Linux, even withouth their fancy interfaces. But this sounds like something that might be an interesting challenge none the less as I'd like to have the other part of my harddrive accesible by windows if need be.

Would it be possible to wipe the partition and get rid of possibly the item in there that is messing up windows (I've installed Windows after having FC5 on a system before so it shouldn't be that) and just rebuild it from scratch and just include my boot and linux partition and hope that maybe allows it to work as normal?

I was wondering the same thing. What if you formated the partition where you want to install xp? Or go into fdisk and blow it away and recreate it. I wonder if that would help. Might be worth a try. Be sure to backup all data first, just in case it goes south on you.

Actually I used fdisk to blow it away originally. I had vista on it, I used parted to remove it, then I used fdisk to create it a number of ways (linux, fat32, ntfs) so that hasn't seemed to help. I'm wondering if vista may have let a present in there (as this has only occured after its been installed).

Is there a way I can get more details on the partition table or that area of the disk beyond fdisk -l or the free command in parted?

kellinjar please, take it easy!I don't mean to be rude, but do you have the least idea of what you're doing?
You see, if you just mess around with your partitions - use fdisk, parted, change partition types... - if you don't know about these things you'll end up destroying everything!
You're in a hurry, I know.
I've been there myself, believe me.
Several times.
Number one advice: What to do when you're in a hurry: ...do nothing!
Please take my advice: don't rush!

You need to be calm, to think, to understand.
That will take an hour of your time.
It will also save you from spending a month or so, trying to restore what's lost.

Or maybe I just misunderstand you (english is not my native language), if so skip all the above.

* Wipe the Vista partition: Yes, a good idea. Vista is newer than XP, meaning XP can't understand Vista.
You could try to empty the PBR: Let's say Vista is installed on /dev/hda2:
# dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda2 bs=512 count=1
(note: I have fiddled around a bit with 'dd', 'bs=1 count=512' or 'bs=512 count=1' or just 'count=512' never noticed the difference. Maybe there is a difference, be careful. I always use 'bs=512 count=1', it has worked for me.)
If Vista is on /dev/hda1 it means you have to erase the MBR. To not erase the partition table, change sector nr to 440:
# dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda1 bs=440 count=1
This will save yor linux-primary-partitions, not your logical volumes!
Well, if you allow Windows to handle your entire disk, you won't have any linux partitions left.
But if Windows only handles/formats the Windows-partitions this is quite ok.

How about this, it will make you safe:
Borrow a large USB-disk. Copy everything you want to keep to it - you could copy the entire distro, my preferred way to do that is to boot a live-cd and copy from it. Issue (assuming /dev/hda2 is / )
#cp -a /mnt/hda2/* /usbdrive/
Copy all your linux-partitions the same way, though easiest is to copy them into "destination". Like if you have a separate /usr/local, then copy it to /usbdrive/usr/local and remove /etc/fstab entry for /usr/local.
Edit /usbdrive/etc/fstab, if usbdrive is /dev/sda1 then the / line should be something like:
/dev/sda1 / ext3 defaults 1 1

You need to point boot-loader to correct / also. With Grub, you can edit the boot-line:
Boot, press 'E' when menu shows, press 'E' again.
Now change "root=/dev/hda5" (or whatever) to "root=/dev/sda1"

I hope this makes sense to you? If not please keep asking - but I must confess I'm soon going to bed.
Anyway, don't rush. It's worth the time to wait & think, believe me... once upon a time, I didn't...

I like to take a certain amount of risk

I have a couple of big HDs sitting across my network I can use, so yes I could just copy -r /mnt/linuxpartition/* /networkshare/backup
and then wipe the drive, partition and drop it back on.
But I guess I was hoping there was some way to actually repair the partition table so XP is all cool with it. And since I had FC5 installed first, I know I'd have to reinstall grub, I've done that once or twice so no stranger there.

There is always the "nuke it" and try again option, which I consider moving all the data across the network to be, but I'm going in to IT, so I'd like to find better ways to do things if they exist. Maybe one doesn't exist in this case.

As I said above, can I get a more detailed view of exactly whats contained at the front of my drive to see if something in there might throw up a flag and say "hey that's not supposed ot be there, that is whats causing the issue".

I don't know If this'll help but why not say something.

I'd just copy all the important stuff off of FC5 onto one of your network drives (look in your home folder, bookmarks, email address's, etc)

Wipe it all.

Install Linux, make a swap, install windows, check GRUB if windows is an option, otherwise make it an option, copy all your stuff from the network storage, back to FC5.

Done.


All that stuff will probably redo the MBR, so nothing should be a problem.

But Windows will sometimes like to make it the Active partition or something like that, make the 2 linux ones do nothing... I knew a great little program that booted from a floppy, that let change things like that.

Reading the mbr is not exactly trivial.
To start with, save the mbr to a file:
# dd if=/dev/hda of=/usr/local/mymbr_6sept2006 bs=512 count=1
Now you can use 'cat' to view it:
#cat /usr/local/mymbr_6sept2006
I doubt it'll tell you anything, though.
Maybe try some live-rescue-cd's like UBCD, Insert, PlanB. Here's a list: http://www.frozentech.com/content/livecd.php
Never really tried them myself, can't say which one is best for you.

Even though I don't think you'll get anywhere, it's very educating to fiddle around with these things (of course you copy everything you want saved to network drive first.)