i have a laptop with Red Hat installed on it. the floppy bay is broken. im looking for a way to fdisk, format, or debug this system without floppy support. i tried booting from a bootable windows xp cdrom at start up. but it just loads redhat normally everytime. i just need a way to get linux off, and xp on, without floppy support. someone suggested running windows from inside linux. but im having trouble mounting my cdrom... any suggestions?

and yes ive thought about using a external floppy drive. but im tryin to do this the cheap way and not buy one. please get me some feedback

Why not just use the XP installation disk to delete the Linux partitions and reformat them.

Check the boot order in your BIOS settings. CD-ROM should come first.

Oh, now I know what he meant by "it just boots Redhat". Somehow I'd misunderstood that.

the boot order is correct in bios. it finds the atapi cdrom drive when its booting.. so it says.. it just doesnt boot the cd like it normally should. im new to linux so its all jargin to me. but i dont know what else to.. might need that ext floppy after all