Windows setup says no hard drives detected
 

I installed suse over vista and now want to go back to XP, but the windows setup says it cannot detect any hard drives. I used DBAN to wipe the drive and windows setup still says the same thing, but even then I can install suse just fine.

this is on a HP laptop model DV9000

Do you have a drive with empty space?

just one drive and its all used by suse right now

So you don't have any space to install Windows. You could try reducing one of the other partitions to make room. The SuSE partitioner may be able to do that. You could try booting up with the installation disk, and go as far as the advanced partitioning. Then abort after the partition is resized. You should still backup any important data, but since this is a new install, you may not have any, and if things go wrong, you could reinstall.

You might need to uninstall SuSE entirely, install XP, and reinstall SuSE. Last I checked, XP, Vista, and 2k leave nasty effects on existing linux installations.

It looks like the original poster wants to replace the Linux installation with Windows.

Have you tried reformatting the hard drive before running the Windows disk? I had a similar problem a while ago, and I booted up a Knoppix disk and ran "dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda" (This took about eight hours for my machine. Be patient...), and after that the Windows setup disk ran properly.

Your problem is MS refuses to recognize and Linux formatted partitions, you will have to delete the partitions with a better tool that Windows before it will see the space.