Hello! I need a Hand here..

[ironhyd]

Greetings,

I recently bought a new Lenovo IBM thinkpad. I immediately installed Ubuntu on it, instead of the Pre-installed vista, just like i did on my Desktop. It's Jaunty Jackalope to be exact, and i am very happy with it, it's very practical to work with, especially for programming Webpages & co.

So far so good..

Now i got my Windows 7 license and i wanted to Install it, so i can run all my necessary Adobe programs (Dreamweaver, Cs4 Flash and such)

Problem is when i boot with the Windows CD a blank screen appears, and on the top left corner a little white stripe blinks repeatedly.

There are remenants of the Lenovo recovery system for Vista, which doesnt work though. I also tried various commands in Linux such as "cfdisk" which gives me Critical Error, and "fdisk dev/sda5" (sda5 obviously beeing my primary partition, the others are the recovery things, and some free space).

What i want is to be able to install windows 7. I dont care if i loose all the data on the disk.


I hope you can help me,
Cheers

[rcgreen]

Your Windows 7 disk will probably look for a Vista system on
the computer before it will proceed. You should try to restore
Vista. It probably restores from a hidden partition. If you deleted
that partition, you will need to get them to send you a restore cd.

The partition may still be there, but you have the Linux bootloader
on the hard drive, and need to restore the original one.

The Super Grub utility may be of help here.

Super Grub Disk Homepage

Otherwise a restore CD from the manufacturer.

[D-cat]

If you want to keep your data on the hard drive, you'll need to edit your partition table with a resize program. cfdisk will give an error if run from the drive you're trying to resize... it must be run from a live CD and the disk you're editing cannot be mounted.

The best CD for this is the PartedMagic CD. It includes SuperGrub for after the Windows install, so it should be all you need.

Note: Windows must be installed on a primary partition (sda1-4) formatted NTFS. It will error out if you try to install to an extended partition, so plan your partitions accordingly.

---

If you really want to just clear the hard drive blank for a Windows install, you can do that with just about any live CD, including the standard Ubuntu install disk (as live)... Open a root terminal window and type

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda bs=1M

That will zero your entire hard drive, making it look like a blank factory disk for Windows to install on. Note, this will wipe a recovery partition too. With this in mind, you may wish to use a backup tool (like partimage) to keep your original recovery partition safe on external dis(c/k) first.

[ironhyd]

I went with the complete delete, with the command you gave me:

"dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda bs=1M"

Worked very well, but now when i start the PC with the Windows CD, i still get the black screen with the white stipe that blink in the top left corner..

then after a few minutes, it beeps, and tells me "Select proper boot device or instert boot media in selected boot device and press a key".

But the windows cd is already in the drive...

[D-cat]

That's really odd... I assume the Linux CDs are booting okay. Have you tried booting this Windows CD in another computer? I'm wondering if it's defective. Another possibility is a BIOS compatibility issue... should google if it's a known problem...

There isn't much I can really do not knowing the model. You can try pressing F12 before the POST beep and seeing if you can force a CD boot... it might give a hint to the problem too.

[ironhyd]

Cd is brand new, it has to work.. worked fine on my desktop.

When i force boot it, the CD drive makes lots of noise, for a min or two. then i get that message again.

I googled, but the problem appears when the harddisk isnt recognized. In this case its a CD drive though..

*edit

could it have something to do with the master boot record?

should i try fdisk/mbr ?

*edit2

Worked! thanks for the Help!

-close-

[MikeTbob]

You shouldn't have a MBR left after running that command...with that being said, it can't possibly hurt to run that fdisk/mbr command. I would be looking at the CDROM drive, it could be dirty or defective, could be a hardware issue....start removing hardware one by one and see if that helps anything.

[ironhyd]

Ohh i wouldn't dare open up a Laptop wich still hast warranty left ^^

Anyways, problem solved! I ran fdisk/mbr (if it helped or not, i dont know) and i booted a partitioner programm. I created an NTFS partition and retried booting windows from CD. It worked to my surprise

Thanks for the tipp "dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda bs=1M"

Now i also know what to do when i sell a HDD.

Greetings,
ironhyd