trying to resinstall windows: system hangs after booting
 

So I'm trying to reinstall Windows (trying to do a few things to troubleshoot my new laptop.... one of which is flash the BIOS, but I need Windows). Problem is, something's preventing me from doing so. I'll hit F12 at the beginning and boot from the CD drive. It'll say "press any key to boot from disc", so I do, and it starts reading the disk. However, after saying something like "checking system configuration" it stops. The CD stops spinning, the computer stops running, etc. Any ideas as to why this might be occurring? Or any suggestions about how to reformat my drive to be NTFS and reinstalling Windows? Help would be appreciated. BTW, I don't have a floppy drive so I'm prevented from doing a few things in that case (boot floppy).

I don't know which tools you have, but one thing you could do it use a live cd or the rescue mode of the first installation disc, and delete the drive you want to use for windows. Let the windows installer format this space as an NTFS partition.

Hey jschiwal, thanks for the reply. A question then, as I don't quite know how to use linux yet. The distro I'm using is fedora core 3. I know how to get about entering rescue mode, but how would I go about deleting that drive? I'm not too sure how to use the command prompt for linux yet. Also, I could be wrong, but fc3 doesn't have a live cd right? I know some other distros do... but would those work? And how would that help anyhow? Thanks

when u boot with the disc1 of ur linux distro the first thing u'll see is a partition tool. just delete the win partition then press next until you see the progress bar of the intallation, then press cancel :)