entire hard disk is formatted as type ext3 and i am unable to install XP now

[fedorized_111]

i have a HDD of 160 GB single partition and by mistake i hav installed fedora 5 on it now i want to install XP too but my PC is not accepting the XP installer disk at the startup. It gives a message "booting from disk..." and then the screen goes blank.
it may be because the entire disk is in a format which is not supported by XP, but i reallly need to install XP , i have already lost all of my data ( about 110 gb) in this process.....plzz solve this prob.

[fedorized_111]

hey friends please let me kno if my querry is clear to you?
i badly need help in this regard

[stoat]

Hello fedorized_111,

You have just found out by accident why it is nearly universally recommended to install XP first. Since your Fedora is a new installation with little time invested in it, and since you have already lost your valuable files, I recommend that you start over by wiping the drive clean by any means (get some ideas for how to do that when the XP CD will not boot here and here). That will allow your XP CD to boot normally again and install XP. While in XP Setup, you can create a partition of whatever size you want for XP. Leave the remaining space as unpartitioned. Then install Fedora in that remaining space. Things will go much better for you that way.

[Scott_fakename]

So, the easiest would be to as stoat suggests.

Otherwise, you can throw the fedora liveCD in and resize the fedora partition using gparted. Then, leave an unallocated spot for WinXP and tell XP only to install to that partition.

But that's going to take a long time. Only try that if you can't uninstall for some reason, like you have more files that you want to keep.

--Scott

[stoat]

Originally Posted by Scott_fakename

...you can throw the fedora liveCD in and resize the fedora partition using gparted. Then, leave an unallocated spot for WinXP and tell XP only to install to that partition.

But that's going to take a long time.

Hello Scott_fakename,

Your idea is a good one. And seemingly logical, too. However, it's not that it would take a long time. The problem with it is that fedorized_111's XP CD will not boot to do the XP installation as long as the Fedora partitions are sitting there (a very common and well-known thing going back for years with the XP CD).

P.S.: Here's a related idea that just popped into my head: fedorized_111 could try your idea but shrink/move the Fedora partitions from the "front end" of the drive creating space for XP at the beginning of the drive. I don't recall anyone here ever trying that variation before. It might work. I wish fedorized_111 would try it and report the result. It might also help to go one extra step and create a new NTFS partition for XP in the thusly created space. No promises (to fedorized_111) however, I have read plenty of posts where the XP CD would not boot even when the Linux partitions were located well away from the beginning of the drive. Finally, doing that will break things in Fedora because the partition count will be changed (grub.conf & fstab). Those can be fixed via linux rescue.

[stevea]

Originally Posted by stoat

Hello Scott_fakename,

Your idea is a good one. And seemingly logical, too. However, it's not that it would take a long time. The problem with it is that fedorized_111's XP CD will not boot to do the XP installation as long as the Fedora partitions are sitting there (a very common and well-known thing going back for years with the XP CD).

P.S.: Here's a related idea that just popped into my head: fedorized_111 could try your idea but shrink/move the Fedora partitions from the "front end" of the drive creating space for XP at the beginning of the drive. I don't recall anyone here ever trying that variation before. It might work. I wish fedorized_111 would try it and report the result. It might also help to go one extra step and create a new NTFS partition for XP in the thusly created space. No promises (to fedorized_111) however, I have read plenty of posts where the XP CD would not boot even when the Linux partitions were located well away from the beginning of the drive. Finally, doing that will break things in Fedora because the partition count will be changed (grub.conf & fstab). Those can be fixed via linux rescue.

Hey Stoat -

I looked for details on this problem (doesn't affect me - I'm windows-free zone here) and the MS support seems to think that the installer believes the MBR is "corrupt". That's baloney but ...

What I'd suggest is you try is:
1/ go ahear and repartition w/ an NTFS using gparted
2/ copy the boot partition and the following sectors to a usb stick.
dd if=/dev/sda of=/media/disk/mbrplus bs=512 count=31
3/ use fdisk or sfdisk to change all the linux partition types to vfat.
4/ install XP to the ntfs
5/ dd the mbrplus back to /dev/sda using a live cd (or puppyLinux of the USB)

It would be interesting to try, but it's a lot of trouble to go through all because Redmond ships a broken installer.

[forkbomb]

Originally Posted by stoat

fedorized_111 could try your idea but shrink/move the Fedora partitions from the "front end" of the drive creating space for XP at the beginning of the drive.

I've tried it before. It was taking so long that I decided about a tenth of the way through the process that it wasn't worth my time, even though I effectively destroyed my partition table and much of my data by interrupting the gparted process halfway through (I believe the whole process of moving 50GB of partitions from front to back would have taken Gparted about 4 hours if not more).

Not worth the time. I'd start over with a clean slate, install XP first to a single NTFS partition on the drive, resize the partition from Windows, and then install Fedora afterwards (using the free space option on the installer).

[stoat]

stevea & tjvanwyk,

Thanks for your input. Yeah, there will be issues to deal with no matter what course of action is chosen. Enough to make someone stop and think twice about it. And still it may not work after the effort. I, too, prefer clean trouble-free installations versus fixing a bunch of busted things. BTW, I forgot to mention in my list of busted things that GRUB would surely have to be re-installed, too.

P.S.: I once tried temporarily "disquising" my Fedora partitions as vfat with fdisk. It didn't work. The XP CD was not amused.

[mickwombat]

Hi there,

Well I had a similar problem and I had a working copy of an XP disk but it wasn't booting off it, just going into a dos prompt. Assuming you have a dos prompt, all is not lost. I sort of got through it myself. Details in my thread here.

Take particular note about post #9 and #10 re copying the contents of i386 to the partition you want windows on.

You might need to do a bit of googling on using fdisk.

http://forums.fedoraforum.org/forum/...d.php?t=177935

Good luck