I've got a couple of computers running FC8 and I've just run into this now. i tried loading FC8 on my compaq NC6120 laptop and everything worked just fine until...I was going to reload it with XP. i can't boot onto either the XP CD, or a bartPE cd. it just gives me a black screen after displaying the message, setup is inspecting your hardware configuration. anyone else ever seen this. I'd really like to know how to get XP back on this laptop.

What are trying to do a dual boot Xp and Fedora 8 ?
Ore have installed Fedora 8 and delete XP ?
Do you have the install Cd of XP

When win XP probes for hardware it reads part of any hard drives it finds (posibly the boot sector, to detremine if the drive already has windows on it) there may be a bug in the windows installer (that bartCD uses too) that can't deal with the data it finds from the FC install.

If you're going to nuke your FC instalation, you could try low level formating you HDD first. If it's posible there will be an option in your BIOS.
If there isn't an option in your BIOS, see if you can boot with a live CD (like Knoppix or Ubuntu live) if you can, use the formating tools from there to wipe your drive (remember to remove partitions, if you can).

If that dosen't work, try a win98 boot disk (ether CD or floppy if you have a floppy drive). Use that to ether format your disk (abort before it actualy installs anything), or format from DOS.

i appreciate the assistance. I did find a way to do it though. my intention originally was to make it a dual boot system but i've read you need to have winxp on there first. either way i had to get XP on the computer quickly because it's a loaner laptop for my company and not a soul here would know how to use Linux. my findings were as follows. While fedora is booting I hit ^C and it interrupted the booting process and dropped me to a cmd prompt. I then issued the cfdisk command and deleted all the local partitions. After that it was able to load my Bart disc. i was going to try a 98 boot disk but i didn't have the time to make it a CD, and couldn't find a direct ISO for it. It's a newer laptop hence, no floppy drive. so right now i've got the system back to win xp. If anyone has a good how to for making this a dual boot I'd really appreciate it though. I don't have a live CD though so if that's the recommendation, I'd need to know where to get one.

Thanks,
Beer

When I dualboot I always use grubldr. It uses the windows bootloader to boot grub, so windows can't bork your custom linux boot sector becuase you don't have one.

For a good live CD try http://www.knopper.net/knoppix/index-en.html which is based on Debian, or http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FedoraLiveCD for a live version of fedora. Knoppix is excelent and I use it all the time for fixing broken windows boxes, LiveFedora I've never tryed but it seems OK.