Hello there i was wondering if somebody could help me i have tried ubuntu for a while and i have liked it however there have been quite a few teething problems which even with hours of studying tutorials and stuff i still can not compile and work, so i have decided to go back to XP now the problem is, that in most tutorials it says for you to just wack in the windows cd and then recovery console and format via that, i cannot do that as before it even thinks about getting to that option it says there is no hard drive, i have tried using the patitioning program in ubuntu but the flaw with it is that you cannot format a primary drive whilst it is mounted, which is fair enough however there isnt a way that i know of where you can do it in a command line based interface of which you just type a command simular to format c:. i do know of one command which is sudo rm -rf however, i do not know what it acually wipes, does it fill your hdd with zeros or what? my drive isnt completly ubunted as i know i could use the vista cd when i get home, however i am sure there is loads of more users who are presented in this position with no explanation of what to do.

there should be nothing to do at all. Windows will allow you to delete the partitions and start again completely. You could just use a dos boot disk and fdisk to delete the partitions (or an ubuntu rescue disk or something with fdisk / cfdisk in there...), but again, windows will do this during the install anyway. if it says there's no disk, you presumably have other problems.

Isn't is like you just boot off the Windows cd and start installing readily then? Why bother formating? The installation itself does it, I think.

personally its not the disk as i said before itll take me the time of a format to complete using the vista install cd but what if a user doesnt have one of them discs, then there screwed lol seriously screwed.

yeah i would of thought so as well but the problem is that it will load all of the basic processes and drivers and then you will have the option to carry on the install where it should format and then it states windows did not find a valid disc installation cannot continue please press f3 to continue which reboots the machine

no, not in the slightest, you just don't understand what your problem is. rm -rf and such are just utterly irrelevant, you just want access to unpartitioned disk space, and the windows installer should do this for you straight off. i guess you probably could just run "sudo cfdisk /dev/sda" under ubuntu and delete your own partitions and reboot to a blank system.

the xp insatll screen where you delete your old partitions: http://content.techrepublic.com.com/...11-5181-4.html

doing windows support is great!

would it work because in theory you need to be in the os to perform the sudo function so if you wanted to delete the primary partition which is being used at the time wouldnt it deny you the right to do so as it is still using it? if not then thats cool

as above in case you didn't read my later reply...

Boot a livecd (knoppix etc.), get a root terminal, unmount any mounted drives, and enter.

or if a newish kernel (2.6)
Then run your XP CD and install Windows.