[aggiebass09]

Hi I recently had a computer where I had to wipe the drive but I had no operating system to put back onto it so I ended up getting SuSE 9.3 and installing it on there. Now I have a Windows XP CD and I want to install Windows XP and get rid of Linux. How would I go about formatting my hard drive so that I can then boot from the XP disk?

[robin_bga]

Originally Posted by aggiebass09

Hi I recently had a computer where I had to wipe the drive but I had no operating system to put back onto it so I ended up getting SuSE 9.3 and installing it on there. Now I have a Windows XP CD and I want to install Windows XP and get rid of Linux. How would I go about formatting my hard drive so that I can then boot from the XP disk?

No one in this would answer that question, coz i advocate for linux, now windows, we only say that windows is a secondary OS, so u have your linux a side dual booting with xp, anyway, what u do is, run the xp cd, then u will have many options but u will be prompted to press ¨r¨ for console repair, so when the console comes up, press 1, then press enter when prompted for the admin password, then the command prompt show up, then type ¨fdisk /mbr¨ that will reset the mbr so now u can go on and set up you windows xp installation.
Simple uhh?

Cheers
RObin

[aggiebass09]

hah yeah i kinda figured it was that. i might've gotten a bad disk because i can't seem to boot from the cd but I can boot from SuSE so I know the CD drive isn't bad.

in my defense i'm trying to set up a dual boot on my laptop but it's off being repaired at the moment and I need windows for things i need to get done and i only have linux on here so yeah lol

[devils casper]

Boot up SuSe and log in as root. Open Terminal/Konsole and execute this

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda bs=521 count=1

If you have SATA Hard Disk then replace hda with sda.
Above command will wipe your HardDisk and Windows Installation CD will work after that.

[gogalthorp]

Legal point. Windows is not free. If you have a pirated disk you could have problems. Legally you can not even give a ligit disk to someone else because that disk is licensed to a machine not to you. XP has DRM restriction and will work only for 30 days before you have to call MS and explain yourself. If it is an OEM disk that comes from a manufacturer then it might not work at all in your machine because of drivers. So you must purchase a new copy for each machine. Even if the machine used to have a ligit copy and you just lost the old install CD.

What application must you run in Windows?? Maybe some one can help finf an OS program that does the same thing or it may run under wine.

[devils casper]

Originally Posted by gogalthorp

Legal point. Windows is not free. If you have a pirated disk you could have problems. Legally you can not even give a ligit disk to someone else because that disk is licensed to a machine not to you. XP has DRM restriction and will work only for 30 days before you have to call MS and explain yourself. If it is an OEM disk that comes from a manufacturer then it might not work at all in your machine because of drivers. So you must purchase a new copy for each machine. Even if the machine used to have a ligit copy and you just lost the old install CD.

I agree but in some machines Windows Installation CD doesn't work after Linux Installation. It just hang at Inspecting Hardware screen. One has to remove Linux Boot Loader ( GRUB/Lilo ) from MBR.