Hi. I was kind of happy w/ a dual boot installation of WinXP and Fedora 9 on my Dell Latitude D830. Fedora worked great (except for some mouse pointer late awakening).

Then problems w/hardware; the hard disk was replaced. "Well" I said to myself "Let's get rid of Windows." since F9 worked fine. Reinstalled encrypted (LUKS) F9. To my surprise, I have problems with audio and display or keyboard (Fn-brightness)... Maybe something broke when replacing HD...

Now I'd like to reinstall Windows to be sure h/w is ok, but I can't; it goes as far as "setup is inspecting your computer's h/w"... and the disk goes on spining, and spining, and spining...

Considering I'm really new to encryption (LUKS), what can I do to reinstall Windows?

You can try shredding the drive with DBAN. Just do a single pass and then try reinstalling.

This is a Windows issue, so I'm moving it to General.

Thanks... (Seemed to me that "LUKS encryption" implied Linux (Fedora) security. Was looking for a way to remove disk encryption. :-)

A "single pass" did work for me; not with DBAN, though. Thanks again.