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I recently installed Fedora 6 on my laptop. I'm having some issues with it and want to reinstall Windows so that I can dual boot. I wiped the entire drive out with the Fedora install so I no longer have an NTFS drive and the MBR doesn't seem to let me boot my XP CD from boot. I don't know what to do to get Windows back on my laptop. Any suggestions?
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to delete the non-dos partition or restore the mbr? I am kind of guessing here.
download "freedos" and try it. I personally uses Novell7 when nothing else would work but I don't think you would be able to get hold of a copy of that nowaday.
http://www.freedos.org/freedos/files/
Wipe the hard drive with DBAN or KILLDISK, and then boot to your XP CD to create an NTFS partition and install XP. A simple wipe with zeroes will suffice.
I decided that since Windows blows, I'm going to be sticking with Linux as my primary OS and installed Ubuntu instead of Fedora and it's working nicely. I still have the issue of not being able to boot my Windows cd though and I think it's because of the MBR. When I try to boot with the XP cd, I get Error code 4. Is there a way to fix this issue in Linux i.e. set up a dual boot without cashing out the entire HD? Thanks for all the suggestions btw. I'm totally new to this OS and it would be a little overwhelming if there weren't such a KA community.
Microsoft KB article:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/330181
Did you have any hardware trouble? Did you install any new hardware recently?
What I would do:
Wipe the HD with DBAN.
Create two partitions when installing XP from the XP CD.
Install Linux to the second partition.
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