I recently installed SuSE 10.0 on my machine which has ASUS K8SMX motherboard with AMD Athlon 64 processor. Actually, I have a dual boot system with Windows XP and SuSE10.0. Due to some problems with Windows XP, I decided ti reinstall XP. So, I popped in the CD, I get a screen which shows "Setup is checking your hardware's configuration...". But after that, the screen becomes blank and the system hangs. I thought that the CD was busted but I checked it on my friend's system and it worked fine. I reinstalled XP using this same CD without any problems. Can any one here tell me what the problem is?

I had this problem before when i tried doing the same thing. I think it has something to do with windows unable to read linux partitions and causing the inspection of the computer to stall because when i removed the hard drive with linux installed on this problem disappered for me and windows installed fine.

If you have linux on a seperate drive try removing it when you try installing windows and connecting it back in when the installation has finished.

If they are on the same drive but seperate partitions im not sure how to solve the problem.

I have exactly the same situation. I had a working XP/Mandrake 10.1 dual boot, single HDD system to which I added a second HDD for data, mainly photos and mp3s. That all worked fine for a couple of weeks then I got the can't find hal.dll message. I managed to fix that with my OEM XP recovery disk and a complete install, which was a good thing anyway speeding up XP nicely. Everything was fine once more.

Then I upgraded to Fedora core 4. The hal.dll message reappeared so I "knew" what to do. This time however it would not boot. It won't get to the recovery console or install. I've also tried new XP home and Professional CDs to try and install from scratch.

Using Linux I can see hal.dll and I'm working my way to being able to overwrite it with another copy in case it is corrupted. If that fails my next plan is to try to reformat the XP partition and reinstall. And failing that, It's time for a new HDD.

Any other ideas would be appreciated.

AMD Athlon 64 3200, nForce 3, 1GB RAM, 2xSATA 160GB

I had the same problem with the 32 bit version of Windows xp:
After installtion of Suse 9.3 (64bit), windows did not work correctly anymore.
With the 64 bit version of Windows xp, both OS (Windows xp x64 and Suse 10.0 64 bit) are not working correctly.

Check for more than 1 "active" partition - the XP installer won't tolerate more than one.

Linux doesn't require or use the active flag - just make the XP partition active.

sygoo: That's interesting because I get a choice of two XP Homes to boot into, though I've not seen a difference. I will check gain what partitions are mentioned in GRUB later.

I have to type this not cut and so please excuse the formatting.

grub.conf shows me two Linux versions, which is fine because I updated the kernel automatically, and one I assume is XP below:

title Other
rootnoverify (hd0,2)
chainloader +1

fdisk shows me

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/hda 1 13 104391 83 Linux
/dev/hda2 14 2550 20378452+ 5 Extended
/dev/hda3 * 2551 5100 20482843+ 7 HPFS/NTFS
/dev/hda4 5101 9732 37206540 7 HPFS/NTFS
/dev/hda5 14 2550 20378421 8e Linux

and on the other disk

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/hdb1 * 1 30515 245111706 7 HPFS/NTFS

So it does look a bit like 2 XPs trying to boot but it doesn't show up in grub.

Where I have helped others with this issue, there have been two active partitions - on the BIOS boot disk; i.e. /dev/hda in Linux-speak. This is shown as two asterisks in the fdisk list.
I have asked people to remove the extra active flag, and the problem has been resolved.
Apparently not the case for you - odd.

I know the XP boot-loader checks for more than one active flag, and aborts if this is the case, so I have guessed that the installer does similar. The loader simply checks primary partitions - empirical evidence suggests the installer checks logical partitions as well.
I can't believe that even M$oft would be stupid enough to check all the disks, but I'd suggest you try taking the flag off the second disk and try again (the flag is meaningless on a non-boot disk).
Other than that I'm out of ideas.

I used a GParted Live CD to look at my partitions...I had a 100 mb /boot partition first, then a 1 GB DOS, then a 30 GB NTFS, then a 30 GB LVM with Fedora 7 installed. I un-checked all of the "boot" flags in GParted, as only the NTFS partition was checked to begin with, but the XP cd still hangs... The only flag is "lvm" on the fedora lvm partition. There must be a way to save my linux partition but still re-install windows...help?

Scott