The XMEN Clan Forums

Ok, I've got student license for WinXP Pro and UC gave me a disk. I boot from the disk:
"Windows is inspecting your system hardware... blah blah blah..." screen goes blank. Nothing! HD light goes solid....... 45 mins later....... nothing, zilch, zero, zip.... I don't get it.

わかりません!

Obviously doesn't like SOMEthing about your system... Do you get support with that license? Might be time to call MS.

Another thing you can do is strip the system to bare essentials. Mobo, HD, 1 stick of ram, and video, and see if it does the same thing.

oh... here's the kicker... I even tried the cd I used to install windows on here the first time! Same exact thing! I've made no hardware changes since the first time I installed windows. All I did was reformat and install Linux... now I want to go back to windows.

Ah! If your drive is partitioned completely with Linux, Windows can't recognize it - it's an "unknown partition type."

What you should do is use a Linux utility to delete the partitions on the disk, or you could use it to make a FAT32 partition. Then try your install again. Knoppix works well for that sort of thing.

ohhhhh...... well... I was going to cut my Linux partition down to 50GB... so that leaves 200GB for windows. (I have to reinstall linux anyway... it did some goofy things and I'm missing packages. I can't install them because Fedora thinks they are already installed and I can't delete them because they are not there. )

Thanks!

Update:
With 200GB of unpartitioned space it still doesn't work. Maybe I'll just format the entire drive fat32 and see what happens.

Well, I'm thinking the unpartitioned space should have done it - but then again this is Microsoft...

You shouldn't have to reinstall Linux for the reasons you describe. There are ways of updating the package database, and there are ways of forcing the install even if the database thinks they're already there. A lot of times that'll be a "-f" or some such on your rpm command line. There are probably other solutions, but there are the two I thought of right away.

what's the linux equivilant of CHKDSK? or should I make a DOS boot disk on another machine?

The exact error message that I get from the win64 install is:

Windows has been shut down to prevent damage to your computer.

If this is the first time you've seen this Stop error screen, restart your computer. If this screen appears again, follow these steps:

Check for viruses on your computer. Remove any newly installed hard drives or hard drive controllers. Check your hard drive to make sure it is properly configured and terminated. Run CHKDSK /F to check for hard drive corruption, and then restart your computer.

Can fdisk handle a 250BG drive?

er, there is a limit up there somewhere, not sure where.

The linux equivalent of checkdisk is fsck (file system check).

You didn't mention you were installing 64-bit windows. Not everything has 64-bit drivers yet, which could be your problem.

the win64 install gets further than the XPpro install... the XP install just kind of hangs... no error msg... nothing...

update:
goofy things.... I ran fsck against:
/dev/sda
/dev/sda1
/dev/sda2
/dev/hda
/dev/VolGroup00/LogVol00
/dev/VolGroup00/LogVol01
All of them flagged "Bad volume signature" and "Volume bitmap starts at unusual location". Some of them flagged some really goofy things. Like: "Volume creation date is in the future (Fri Jan 27 2006)" LogVol00 & sda1 got fixed, hda posted "not writable" and was not fixed, and the rest returned floating point errors and were not fixed. Now what?

Had a similar problem on an ASUS motherboard before I went to water cooling.


Win 2k Pro would just hang (and reboot if I let it) during the install.

Finally figured out that things were getting too hot. Make sure your CPU is getting enough cool air, and that your RAM is getting enough cool air. On install things are flying back and forth from the CD to your harddisk, and the harddisks can heat the case up real quick I've found.

Another thing...

If you are installing on a SATA drive, then your install disk might not have the proper drivers for the serial ATA controller on the motherboard. But that restart thing in Windows is very familiar to me for the reason above.


Could it be that you have to reformat the drive before you repartition it? Don't know, but maybe your master boot record is hosed. But you should also be able to rebuild it off either the Linux disks or the Windows install disk.

Oh and one other thing: you aren't trying to install onto a SATA drive when a IDE harddisk with jumpers set to "Master" is connected, right?

Nope, just one SATA drive in there. There have been no hardware changes since my last windows install... so I'm just going to nuke the HD tomorrow and see what happens. Maybe it'll do better once the HD has been whiped completely cleen.

You might just have a bad HD. Sometimes they can be bad, but work OK until you try to install. Windows NT family installs are very very touchy.

Woot!!! I got it! I had to install Win2k, then install WinXP, and then I could boot from the XP64 disk! Don't know why and don't really care, because I finally got what I wanted.

Excellent! Glad to hear you got it working without changing hardware.

Seen that before. Some driver in XP tries to load and locks it up. By loading a legacy OS sometimes that driver will load properly from W2K first and then XP will ignore it if works properly. At least that is my theory.