uninstall problems

[albazero]

i installed fedora core 3 a couple of days ago but i made the mistake of formatting my entire hd, im using a laptop with only a cd drive. so now i want to reinstall windows xp, but once i start booting from the cd my computer just hangs after the msg thta says 'checking handware config, my computer at this point is pretty unusable because my wireless card doesnt work with fedora nor does my graphic card... or i only get 800x600 max, my sound doesnt work -_- i just want to reinstall windows for now, is there anyway to solve this?

thanks

[Cabhan]

When you boot up, go to the boot menu (it's usually Esc, F1, F12, etc.). Put your Windows XP CD in the CD drive and boot from the CD. You should end up in the Windows Install screen, and can follow the instructions.

For the record, though, FC isn't a great distro, and a lot of people have had problems with it. You may want to try Mandriva or SuSE, which are generally more user friendly.

[albazero]

i realized it isnt a good distro, and im thinking of installing suse next, but i do boot from cd first and is tries to boot, but the cd stops spinning and the hd just keeps reading and reading and the window stays blank

[Cabhan]

Hrmm...that's not good...

Have you tried running your Setup utility to make sure that everything is being recognized properly? If your HD is really screwed up, you might want to run the Setup utility and change your boot order to boot first from the CD. That way, you'll have no chance of it trying to read the HD at all...

Sadly, I'm not the biggest hardware expert, hopefully someone else can show up and lend a hand...

[albazero]

ive tried setting my bios to read the cd only and cut off the hd, but it still has the same problem, is there any program that can wipe a hd that runs from cd?

[rong]

ive tried setting my bios to read the cd only and cut off the hd, but it still has the same problem, is there any program that can wipe a hd that runs from cd?

Yes and the XP install cd is one of them. But if the XP CD is hanging up there are a number of things that can cause that: the CD itself, memory, HD...

Do you have a bootable floppy disk?

[albazero]

im using a laptop with no floppy drive

[rong]

im using a laptop with no floppy drive

How are you able to get to the internet? On a different box I assume?

Can you reinstall Fedora?

[designbydave]

can you boot to a fedora CD?

if so than i would gess that your windows CD is scratched/bad

[mcmnck]

1. Try your Windows CD in another computer. If it is very scratched you may find that a copy made with a DVD reader/CD writer will work. A DVD drive is better at reading damaged discs.

2. It is more likely that the partition table and/or mbr has been corrupted. Get hold of a LiveCD such as Knoppix or DamnSmallLinux, mount the drive, open a terminal and use the command:

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda bs=512 count=1

which gets rid of all partitions including the MBR and the file allocation table- it overwrites the entire HD with zeros. Then you should be able to start from scratch with the Windows disc.

Please note that I have not tried this, but it would seem a suitable method in your predicament. For more info on 'dd' have a look at this thread: http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...hreadid=174058

Good luck!