Messy Windows Install

[qballirl]

Hi,

I will give you a brief history of my system. I have an Acer Laptop which had windows xp home edition installed on it, i reformatted this partition and installed pro then i resized the partions making a c and d drive, the d drive being for media files only, i then resized again using partition majik, which i made my d drive larger reduced my c drive and created a Linux partition, i then installed fedora core 6 which went fine but i couldnt boot my windows partition after the install and still cant, i can only mount my d drive with success and not my c drive. Now what i am trying to do is boot from the windows cd so that i can reformated my drive and reinstall windows so that i can try to do a succesfull install of fc6, the windows cd boots but when its checking my hardware configuration it just black screens, the hard drive light stays on forever the cd spins for about 2 minutes and nothing, i cannot use a boot disk as i have no floppy drive is there anything i can do to get this situation sorted as google has not been my friend in this situation. Cheers for taking time to read this.

[hybrid]

Hi, I will give you a brief history of my system. I have an Acer Laptop which had windows xp home edition installed on it, i reformatted this partition and installed pro then i resized the partions making a c and d drive, the d drive being for media files only, i then resized again using partition majik, which i made my d drive larger reduced my c drive and created a Linux partition, i then installed fedora core 6 which went fine but i couldnt boot my windows partition after the install and still cant, i can only mount my d drive with success and not my c drive. Now what i am trying to do is boot from the windows cd so that i can reformated my drive and reinstall windows so that i can try to do a succesfull install of fc6, the windows cd boots but when its checking my hardware configuration it just black screens, the hard drive light stays on forever the cd spins for about 2 minutes and nothing, i cannot use a boot disk as i have no floppy drive is there anything i can do to get this situation sorted as google has not been my friend in this situation. Cheers for taking time to read this.

 

If you are prepared to delete everything on the drive and start again from scratch (i.e. delete all partitions), then go and get yourself a Linux Live CD that you can boot from the CD (like Ubuntu). If you download that and burn the ISO image, put it in your computer and restart.

 

When you get to a desktop, go to Applications > Accessories > Terminal.

 

BEWARE
- typing the following command will delete everything, all partitions and all data from your hard drive. Only go through with this if that's what you're sure you want to do.

 

Code:

sudo dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/hda

 

You don't need to let it run all the way through, but give it a minute or so to erase the start of the drive (and the partition table) and that should be enough. Press Ctrl-C to stop it.

 

Now you can shut down and try the Windows installer again.

 

Good luck!