Good day,

I installed redhat enterprise 5 on my laptop and that was a clean install. What I mean is that I installed redhat as the only OS on that laptop. Now I need to uninstall the redhat completely and I want to have Win XP on the laptop but it doesnt let me do it. I tried to boot the laptop from the XP CD but after the hardware inspection screen (when I boot it from Win CD) it just gives me a blank black page. I dont know what to do. I tried different win XP cds but all gave me the same problem.

any ideas? how can i remove redht completely and start XP nstallation.

thanks in advance

I don't think removing Red Hat will solve the problem, it appears the Windows installation disk does not have native drivers for some obscure hardware on the computer. Usually a OEM Windows installation CD will have the necessary drivers. It's more than likely a SATA problem if you have a SATA drive(s). Find out what type of SATA controller the mother board has, download the floppy drivers from the manufacturer of the mother board and hit F6 at the first stage of the Windows installation so it can ask for the drivers at the right stage of the installation. Then, with a borrowed USB floppy drive from a friend, insert the floppy drivers when asked to do so.
It is better to install Windows before Linux, if you do not have a partition or free space for Windows, it will want to install over Linux. You can either get Gparted Live CD to make a partition, or install Windows and let it take the whole drive, then try and install RHEL which should have a partitioning tool to create free space for it.

you cant remove the initial OS you install. what you can do is install first WinXP, then install CentOS to have dual boot. Installing WINDOWS before LINUX wont work. Put a free space for the filesystem of CentOS

Well
Truth is, you can remove RHEL completely by writing zeros across the drive or partition, this process is commonly known as "wiping" a drive clean to a brand new "off the shelf" state. This vendor has some unique and powerful utilities, the one at the bottom of the page is called "CopyWipe". This utility will do just that, wipe it off clean, and it's free to use.
I do this before any OS installation to get guaranteed stability, back in the day when I never would do this, there would be re-occurring nightmares from one installation to the next of the same OS in the same area of the drive. There are many clusters/blocks that are not completely used up, the left over space is called "slack space" where viruses and rootkits can/will reside. If you don't zero fill the partition before a re-format and re-load, those items will still be there, and operating system installers will put the system files in exactly the same sector as the prior installation, that's how you get re-occurring nightmares. Zero filling puts your drive in a "like new" condition.
I use bootitng from the same vendor which has all the right partition tools including the wipe utility.

I tend to agree with this possibility. I've been thru this XP+SATA driver problem myself long time ago. And no, the installation CD don't have it. Also, the driver has to be loaded from device A:

These links might help :

http://www.alexnolan.net
http://news.softpedia.com

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