[Skully]

Hello. I'm new to Linux and recently installed Fedora 8. I want to go back to Windows Vista, but when I put the installation discs in , its tells me that it can't install Windows because I must have a partition as NTFS. Can anyone help me. I'm very lost.

Thanks

[ozar]

Welcome to the forums, Skully!

The quickest way to get back to Vista will be to wipe the drive and start fresh, and then your Vista install CD should work.

To wipe the drive of all content, go to a terminal in Fedora and issue the following commands:

su

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

You'll need to replace /dev/sda with your actual device name such as /dev/hda.

Using the dd command above will write zeros to the entire drive giving you a totally fresh start.

If needed, you can use the fdisk -l command to determine your device name:

fdisk -l

Do let us know how it goes.

[Skully]

Thanks for the quick reply. When I go to the Terminal and type fdisk -1, It tells me "command not found".

[ozar]

It's a lowercase letter l, not a number 1.

If it doesn't work, try putting /sbin in front of the command, this way:

/sbin/fdisk -l

The same goes for the dd command.

[Skully]

I got "bash: /sbin: is a directory"

[ozar]

Sorry, it should have been:

/sbin/fdisk -l

[Skully]

I get "[Skully@localhost -]$"

[ozar]

Ok, try this command from there:

su -

...see if it gives you root access. That's su with a space and a minus.

[Skully]

Perfect. It asked mefor password and entered it. Then it took me to [root@localhost -]#. I entered fdisk -l and it gave me /dev/sda. then entered the dd command. It replied "1+0 records in,1+0 records out,512 bytes (512 B) copied, 4.3e-05 seconds, 11.9 MB/s.

[ozar]

That's it... drive is wiped.

Vista CD should work.