Posted by j_d3
Jay hails from small city Chatham, Ontario where he's grown up and spent his entire life, short of university. Since returning home from school, he has spent the last several years in the radio broadcast industry as an IT professional and Interactive Media Manager.
In my recent attempt to install windows after linux and just replace grub I ran into what seems to be a popular but odd issue. With linux installed and attempting to install windows xp from cd you get the normal “Windows is inspecting the computer’’s hardware configuration…” line but then the screen goes blank. After reading a few posts with many different answers the only solution that worked for me was sadly to dump the linux partitions and start fresh with windows installed first. I will layout how I dealt with the problem.
It turns out that windows cannot properly read the linux partions sometimes. I think it came down to an error in the MBR but am still not entirely sure about it. In the end the only real solution I found to work was booting to the fedora core recovery cd (or install dvd and select recovery) and use fdisk to delete all the partitions on the drive. Below is an example layout.
[root@localhost ~]# fdisk /dev/sda
The number of cylinders for this disk is set to 9729.
There is nothing wrong with that, but this is larger than 1024,
and could in certain setups cause problems with:
1) software that runs at boot time (e.g., old versions of LILO)
2) booting and partitioning software from other OSs
(e.g., DOS FDISK, OS/2 FDISK)
Command (m for help): p
Disk /dev/sda: 80.0 GB, 80026361856 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 9729 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System /dev/sda1 * 1 13 104391 83 Linux
/dev/sda2 14 1603 12771675 83 Linux
/dev/sda3 1604 1668 522112+ 82 Linux swap / Solaris
/dev/sda4 1669 9729 64749982+ 5 Extended
/dev/sda5 1669 9729 64749951 83 Linux
Command (m for help): p
Disk /dev/sda: 80.0 GB, 80026361856 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 9729 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sda1 * 1 13 104391 83 Linux
/dev/sda2 14 1603 12771675 83 Linux
/dev/sda3 1604 1668 522112+ 82 Linux swap / Solaris
/dev/sda4 1669 9729 64749982+ 5 Extended
/dev/sda5 1669 9729 64749951 83 Linux
Command (m for help): d
Partition number (1-5): 1
... continuing this for each partition.
posted on 26.02.2009
kauzi
This issue happens when the MBR is corrupted. It is resolved by formatting the MBR using the command below. Please backup your system before formatting the MBR
dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda count=1 bs=512