Need help installing XP over Linux

Apperently booting off the XP CD doesn't work. All I get is a black screen.

Thanks for any help I can get.

(FYI, Linux is now found on a better box )

It should work. Make sure you've got the CD above any hard drive in the BIOS boot order. And if you have safe or compatibility mode default settings option in your BIOS then select that. Other possibilities I suppose are that you've got a wierd type of CD drive, the disc itself is dodgy or there is some other hardware issue like dodgy memory. Let us know if you find anything

I made the harddrive the first boot devise first thing. I couldn't find a safe or campatibility mode in the BIOS. As far as the harddrive it should be fine, the last user used it and that is how Linux was installed. Dodgy memory? I would think that would be the same as the harddrive, there wasn't a problem with it with the last user.

I forgot to mention that I have formatted at least 4 computers with the same CD I am using for this.

OK. I got a brand new not out of the box yet, XP CD. The computer still gave me a black screen. I can get it to boot off a Linux CD easly enough though.

Hi, you may try this

Do you still have your linux distro installer?

If you still have your linux distro installer, just pop it in your machine and boot from it, when you are ask to repartition your hard drive just remove every partition from your hdd and save it. then load your windows cd and setup as normal

Or try and use fdisk to delete the current partition of your hdd and save it.

basically, what happened was for some odd reason, when you have partitioned your harddrive to reflect that of a linux/unix partition, windows installer CDs finds it hard to read of the hdd.

I've seen this happen when I've installed Slackware on my machine and tried installing XP over it and gave me the black screen. Booting again from my Slackware installer and running fdisk, then deleting the partitions worked.