I am trying to totally wipe out my old Windows NTFS hard drive, install XP first, and then re-partition it to do a dual boot XP / Fedora 8. The drive I have is a 80 GB IDE hard drive that previously had grub on it to dual boot a 2 hd system.

The first time I plugged it in and booted I immediately get "GRUB Hard Disk Error"

I managed to access it and read/write the contents by putting in a boot CD with Knoppix and booting with that. The strange thing is even when the boot order was set to CD first then Hard Disk it still gave me "GRUB Hard Disk Error". The only way I got Knoppix to work was to unplug the power cable to the hard drive, boot off the CD, then plug the power back in on the hard drive.

After that I tried using a Windows (XP?) boot CD to restore the partition table. I ran fdisk removed all the partitions and set one active fat32 partition to take up the full 80GB. Rebooted and got, "GRUB Hard Disk Error". At this point I am wondering what the boot disk really did if it did anything.

It seems like no matter what I do I can't wipe out the partition table information on this disk. Anyone have any idea why GRUB still thinks it is installed, or what I can do to kill it? My goal is just to get the disk to the point where GRUB wont complain and I can install XP on it.

Try this from a Knoppix terminalThat will trash the MBR and the partition table.
XP installer will see it as an uninitialized disk, and will offer to use it and write a disk ID to it. If it sees the disk as hda, modify the command appropriately.

One part of GRUB is in the master boot record. It then must find another part on a hard drive. When it can't find that other part then it gives the disk error.

The fact that you have to trick the computer into booting off of CD, points to a motherboard problem. Also do you have a GRUB floppy disk in the floppy drive? If not try resetting the BIOS to defaults and see if that helps.

Reinstalling windows first should remove GRUB completely from the hard drive. If it doesn't it is possible that hard drive maybe bad.

Paul

pjbgravely I think you were on the right path. After you had mentioned it I recalled that I had seen "BIOS Checksum failed reverting to default configuration" after that error I had gone in and added my HD and DVD drive to the configuration and did a "save & exit" and assumed all was well.

I tried again just now, only I did the save first, then hit save and exit. Now it boots from the CD! It was the BIOS all mucked up.