Can't reinstall Windows on Dual Boot system
 

I have Fedora Core 4 and Windows XP Home on a single SCSI Hard Drive with a Grub Boot loader

Windows (the OS we all love to hate) has developed a number of problems ( surprise surprise) and I wish to reinstall it. However when I boot my system from the Windows XP CD the CD is unable to find my hard drive or windows partition. I thought this may be due to the boot loader in the MBR.

As much as I would love to dump Windows ( I do hate it!) I like my games too much.

Your help is appreciated.:)

if you did install windows it would overwrite your disk's mbr with the M$ homogenous boot loader.

i guess windows wants to format the whole disk? or does it just not see it at all?

Doesn't see it at all

Do you need any third party SCSI drivers? If so, you might have look up the chipset and download drivers to a floppy. I was lucky enough to have a VIA based chipset for my satan drives. (which has drivers for just about every operating system. )

Does windows need the manufactures SCSI card drivers during the install?

I think its something like pressing F6 during the loading of the drivers at the *VERY* begining of the install procedure.

Get into Linux and post the output of "fdisk -l" (ell, as in list)

I concur.


He's absolutely right. But it is possible to protect your boot sector with the bios if you do not wish to reinstall GRUB.

Thanks for that everyone

Will give it a try:study:

Unless the CD drive is also SCSI, probably irrelevant - where is the output I requested.
The answer is probably simple.

I tried running fdisk as root but got "command not found" not found - I am assuming that fdisk is not included in Fedora Core 4 - would Knoppix be helpful in getting the info we need? :scratch:

PS Thanks for your patience :newbie:

I find that hard to believe - did you logon as root, or merely "su".
If the latter, try "su -" instead, or perhaps try "/sbin/fdisk -l".

You were right I was logged in merely as SU and "su -" solved that problem.

Here is the output of fdisk -l as requested:

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sda1 * 1 8980 72131818+ 7 HPFS/NTFS
/dev/sda2 8981 8993 104422+ 83 Linux
/dev/sda3 8994 14593 44982000 8e Linux LVM

I give up - generally when the installer gives grief it's because of things like multiple partitions having the boot flag set - or none at all.

Maybe the others are right and it's a driver problem, although I find it hard to understand how Windows got initially installed.

Windows doesent see the harddrive because it doesent have a driver for the SCSI controller your useing. Need to press f2 during boot and load the SCSI driver from the floppy disk provided by your motherboard manufacture.

if they only gave you a cdrom read the documents provided with it and it should have instructions on how to create this disk.

This has nothing to do with the grub loader.

u have logical volumes in ur SCSI harddrive.
windows cannot read harddisk with basic and dynamic partitions.
is this true?