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reinstalling winXP on a dual boot system

I have windoz on the primary active and fedora 10 on my logical partition.
Everything works fine, but the windoz has got malware ridden. So I wish to reinstall windoz.
Problem is that the windoz installation CD blanks out..... after it attempts to detect the hardwares.
Problem is with grub and the mbr, I think !
is there a way out ?
nishith

Quote:

Originally Posted by nkd (Post 3681041)

I do not think that it has something to do with grub or mbr.
But you can reinstall the windows boot loader .
Use the windows cd and go to the rescue mode the windows command fixmbr and fixboot will restore windows boot and grub is gone.

Quote:

Originally Posted by nkd (Post 3681041)

Hard to say what "blanks out" means exactly, but if you want to overcome this obstacle, do this:

1. Very important -- back up everything you want to keep from the Windows installation, because it's going to get erased in the next step.

2. Choose the "delete partition" option from the Windows installation procedure, then install Windows into a new, empty partition. Make sure you don't get confused about which partition is which. This will get you past the "blanks out" part.

3. After the Windows installation completes, boot from a Linux rescue disk and run grub-install:

Code:

# grub-install /dev/hda (just an example)

There are more details here:

Grub-install

use your installation cd after installing windows to reinstall grub or if you have a floppy drive or can boot from usb make a grub boot disk and make sure it works before reinstalling windows so you can get back to linux to reinstall grub after windows install.

Quote:

Problem is that the windoz installation CD blanks out..... after it attempts to detect the hardwares.

Could you explain more?

The XP install disk requires exactly one partition marked as bootable (or none for a blank disk). Let's see the output of "fdisk -l" (will probably need to be root on Fedora).

thanks a ton for all your inputs...
here is the output of fdisk -l

Quote:

Disk /dev/sda: 160.0 GB, 160041885696 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 19457 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x9d049d04

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sda1 * 1 1020 8193118+ b W95 FAT32
/dev/sda2 1021 19457 148095202+ f W95 Ext'd (LBA)
/dev/sda5 6120 6132 104391 83 Linux
/dev/sda6 6133 8044 15358108+ 83 Linux
/dev/sda7 8045 8171 1020096 82 Linux swap / Solaris
/dev/sda8 8172 13270 40957686 7 HPFS/NTFS
/dev/sda9 13875 19456 44837383+ 83 Linux
/dev/sda10 3571 3583 102400 83 Linux
/dev/sda11 1021 1147 1020064+ 82 Linux swap / Solaris
/dev/sda12 3584 6119 20370388+ 83 Linux

One more thing blanks out means...... when the installation starts after the initial blue screen, windowz displays that it is detecting the hardware and starts to load a number of .dll files , but then it halts and stops responding. I tried out the installation media on other pc's but it goes past this step an installs windoz properly. So nothing is wrong with the media.

thanks
nishith

You can't reinstall windows xp on a dual boot system containing linux.
Try vista or windoz 7 , it works but it will wipe out grub from mbr. So
be ready to reinstall grub2 using a live cd - preferably ubuntu.

Quote:

Originally Posted by nkd (Post 4436955)

of course you can, the caveat is any version of windows will overwrite the MBR, so be prepared to have to re-install grub

are you sure your windows disc inst damaged?