Long Sad Story

My computer with 40 GB HD was partitioned c:\WinXP and d:\Red Hat Linux. My wife and son also use my computer. Neither liked the Grub boot manager dialog so I decided, to keep family peace, to remove the Linux. A few quick checks did not produce the uninstall method so I opted to remove Linux partition and resize the WinXP partition. That operation worked OK. On reboot I find that Grub remained active with Linux still shown. Noticing that there was an "e" edit option, I deleted the Linux entry. When that didn't get desired result, I deleted the Win98 entry. At this point the boot freezes at Grub with no option to move further. After hours of failed attempts to resolve the issue, I open my parts drawer and build another machine.

On the new machine, WinXP will not install. The ISO would not install on a clean partition on the old machine. I wasn't able to install it until I installed SE and then install XP on top of it. On this newly built machine XP would not install on an empty partition or as an upgrade. Help anyone.

The old machine will not boot. Does anyone know how to fix this mess?

goto www.maxtor.com and get the utillity maxblast or powermax?
write zeros on the harddrive and you should be good to go.

this should help until more suggestions come in

eggheads low level format should work.

If you don't want to do that then download this WipeOut it works very very well and does what FDISK can't. Read the *read a me* & remember WipeOut is super strong all partitions will be gone !!! Then format with XP but not the quick format, use the slow format because it will check the HD for bad sectors & fix them if it can....if it can't fix then it will flag the bad sector and re-map the HD so bad sector won't come into play :)

FG-
Apparently you think XP will install from iso after the running Wipeout. Hope you are right.

Too late to start tonight. Let you know what happens tomorrow.

Oh now I get it...non booting ISO ;)

Couple things,
One you can save the partition after uninstalling linux by running a boot disk found at the link below. It requires 4 floppies but will let you boot that disk..
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/r...eleaseid=42819

Once you run the boot disk,

you can boot from startup floppy disks or CD-ROM, choose repair option during setup, and run Recovery Console. When you are logged on, you can run FIXMBR command to fix MBR. To log in, you'll need your admin account and password and choose the partition number that you want to fix..

I had to do this myself recently as I removed redhat and am going to reinstall it.. so this works 100%.

Sorry you are having issues.

I'll pm you about fixing that CD you have now and we'll sort that out.

One other thing, if you want to ever reinstall linux and you don't want grub as your boot manager... install linux first, then install XP, and it should make XP the default boot and use the windows boot loader AFAIK.

The site below discusses bootloading options with Linux and windows XP:

http://www.icculus.org/~lucasw/Linux...otloading.html

Hope that helps you.

For a short term solution to your non-booting XP ISO download these XP Boot Floppies:

http://users.resentment.org/windowsxp/bootflp.htm

OK everyone. I am back in business with both machines. Thanks for the suggestions.