Hello all.

I have an old 20 gig Seagate hard drive that I had Slackware on. ( got a new 80 gig and put Slack on it).

I put the 20 gig in a p3 Hp 1400 mhz pc..
I'm giving this pc away and I'm trying tp put xp pro on it.

I just keeps looping(starting the whole process over) after reformatting durring the xp install.

I don't know if this has anything to do with the Lilo boot loader that was on it or not and Xp is not wiping in out....


Is there any solutions on how to get this hard drive clean so I can install Xp on it...


Thanks..

mman49

So your saying after you install XP and you reboot, the Slackware install still wants to start the installation?

maybe windows can't see Slack, i'd try running slackware install cd and format all drive to fat32 and exit, and then load the XP cd to start all, hope it makes sense

Are you trying to use the partition created under Linux? If so, try deleting it and creating a new one.

Killdisk

Try Killdisk. It is what I use to wipe my disks...works well. Although I do have the "older" free version that came for a bootable floppy, which allows me to do multiple passes at once. The newer version comes for a bootable cd, It only allows you to do 1 pass at a time. I usually only do 1 pass anyways... Killdisk works well though.

Sounds more like an MBR issue. Boot to the recovery console w/XP CD, and type 'fixboot' and 'fixmbr'

Reboot the XP install and try again

We know that XP is not shy about trashing whatever gets in its way. I don't think it has anything to do with lilo or MBR. XP just takes the whole disk for himself.

Boot Slackware CD 1, use cfdisk or fdisk, delete all partitions. Then boot windows cd, go to recovery console. If lilo was on mbr, type fixmbr, if lilo was on partition boot sector, type fixboot. Restart the computer and then install windows.

I had this problem, but tyring to reinstall slack on a slack hard drive. Deleting the partitions worked for me (though I lost all my installed programs )

Thanks guys.
It's appreciated..

I'm actually just testing this 20 gig hard drive to see If I can install xp on it in this HP XT983...The hp has a 30 gig in it with xp on it..I was just testing with the 20 gig to see if I could get xp on then I would put xp on the 30gig that came with the hp..

Anyway, I unhooked my 20 gig and put the 30 gig back on the hp with xp already on it, not I get " no os install"..

I don't know what to do and I already told the people that own this pc that I could fix it...

I've never had this problem before and I've probably worked on 40 or 50 pc's in the laste 5 years...

Any info on what I could do would be appreciated...
I guess I may have to make a call to Hp....

Thanks.

mman49

Brute force approach:
dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda
this writes zeros on everything, result is a totally clean hard drive.

Thanks for the reply guys.
It's so appreciated...
I think the issue is with the HP Bios...It must be mucked up...
It's not even booting up with the original hard drive with xp home on it that was working fine until I put the 20 gig in it..

I guess I'll have to find and Hp forum....

Thanks guys...

mman49

Would I be able to do a dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda with say a live cd with any version of Linux?

To clean that old hard drive of course..


Thanks...

Yes, AFAIK it is a standard Gnu/Linux command. You can also do other things such as wipe only the mbr.

Guys...

Thanks so much...

I'l try it tonight 03/30/2006