well just to play around with FreeSpire and their "free" CNR software I installed it on an older e-machine. the install went very smooth and fast. full install, let it do all the work, took roughly 11min. very fast and clean.

it detected all of the hardware and was much lighter on the computer then pure debian with KDE 3.5 was. so that is the good.

the "FREE" vs of CNR is worthless. you can not install any software with it, you can only install updates. why bother ill just keep using apt-get thank you. thats all CNR is anyways a gui for apt-get so it would appear.

now for the real problem. this was a test computer and we need to get XP installed back on it. yeah yeah i know, but hey this is the situation.

when i try to install any OS including other Linux distros Freespire either loads into grub, or it will "detecting hardware" and hang and do nothing else.

would a live CD (did not have one on my yesterday to test this) alow me to fdisk the hda so i can try to install XP after that or can that not be done with a live cd?

thanks for the help.

Firstly, an OS cannot prevent you from installing another one, end of story. Your BIOS assigns the boot order so you can always boot from another device and any software installed has no say in the matter.

Make sure your BIOS is set to boot from CD first, also a live CD will allow you to use whatever tools it has installed to nuke the drive.

I would like to plug the little "gparted live" solution for reformatting/partitioning your HD, after making sure to follow the above suggestions.

http://gparted.sourceforge.net/livecd.php

as for this being a BIOS issue, wrong. the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd boot were/are all set to CDROM, so it was impossible to boot from the hda. second it is not the boot media either as i had just used that CD not but a few hours earlier on an other system in the same office.

yes normally that would be the case and those are the first things to check when not getting a boot from CD as expected. those were checked, double checked, and so forth.

again the issue is simple. after installing Freespire i was unable to load XP or other Linux distros. one of 2 things happend.

1. computer hung after "detecting your systems hardware"
2. bypass bootable CD and load straight to grub.

i have had this happen before after installing linux on a drive and then be unable to install windows. i have also had a failed winXP install fubar the drive to the point that only a fdisk from floppy (pre-live CD days) could fix it.

this is rare, but not uncommon or unheard of.