Im tryin to Dual Boot XP Home and Fedora 3 on a single 80Gb Hd giving Fedora aprox 15-20 Gb i think im using 15Gb right now and i made the mistake of installing Fedora first now when i go to install XP fresh and boot from the install CD it starts fine and says its checking my comp's hardware configuration then the screen goes all black and the CDROM stops spinning... ive dual booted other versions of Linux and Windows together on the same HD before and never came across this problem its kinda pissin me off sinceive got shit i need to work with for school and work and the semester starts today bleh...

All the dual boot articles i've ever read say to install windows first.

Your solution could be to move the FC3 partition so that there is enough room to install XP on the first partition on the drive.

well right now i have the disk partitioned

Beginning of Disk
/boot ext3 100MB
/noname vfat 60Gb
Virtual 20Gb
End of Disk

Virtual
1024Mb Swap
/ ext3 rest...

so your sayin its tryin to load XP to the /boot part and theres no room? i figured it would just extract it to the /noname part

hmm could use a little plan of action if anyone feels then could help... how should i go about doing this use fdisk to delete all partitions and just hope windows installs then? if that doesnt work im back to reinstallin Fedora for like the 6th time in 24 hours...

bump

Hi,

To be on the safe side I would start from scratch. Delete all partitions and the partition table. I sounds like you have fdisk, and you should be able to do it from there. Otherwise, there might be a tool on your Linux disk.

You have to install Windows first since it has to be on the C drive. XP should let you create the partitions, if not, you can use your linux or fdisk cd.

ONLY create/format the partition you need for XP. I would create it as FAT32 if you want to mount the files so you can read them from Linux. NTFS can not be safely accessed from Linux. If you don't plan on accessing windows files from Linux, you can use NTFS (which is supposed to have a better security). I have found it helpful to access Windows partitions from Linux.
Don't worry about Linux yet.
Install XP. XP should be straight forward.

Insert the Linux CD in the drive upon boot. Linux should recommend a file partition for you, and I would use this if I were you. I don't remember how the Fedora install was, but I am sure you can figure this out). I would select the default for everything. Once you have a stable system up and running, you can start making changes.

Good luck!

hello

before erasing all of the partitions, i just want to say that there might not be a real need for erasing last one, 20 GB, /

just erase the one on wich /boot is, and the one with vfat on it, and you can preserve all your data u had on your linux. and you won't need to re-create swap partition and root partition, /

if, on the other hand, you don't have any important data on your / partition, then just go on and erase everything. u don't need to use partition magic, just erase them from linux, or XP instalation procedure (i'm not sure they can erase non-dos partitions, but if good old fdisk wich came with W98 could, i'm sure it will).

basically, i'm just proposing a way to preserve your data (if u had any

if u didn`t have any data then IMO it would be easier to install fedora then xp... d/l 6 winxp boot disks then when linux is set up to your specs (ie how much of your hdd u want to allocate) boot up with your xp boot disks and format free space then install xp