[orangeverdancy]

I want to remove Fedora Core 5 and place on Windows XP onto my machine, although I only have the XP cd and not the Fedora Core 5 cds. If I have to get a Fedora Core cd to perform an fdisk command, which cd would that be? I'm kinda new to this so more detailed the explanation the better.

[danleff]

The easiest way to do this, in your case, is to get the utility disk for the make of your drive. For example, if you have a Maxtor hard drive, download the Maxbast iso and burn it to a cd. Boot from this cd and choose to maker one large NTFS filesystem, by telling the utility to format the drive for XP use.

Seagate has a good utility for this purpose, if you have a Seagate hard drive.

See the respective hard drive maker's sites for their utility.

You can also either burn a cd of Mepis or SystemRescue cd and use the utility qtparted, which comes with both cd disks to format the disk as fat32.

Or, get cd #1 of Fedora and run the installer to the partitioning utility, format the drive as fat32, allow the partitioning to proceed, then exit the prcess before actually installing Fedora, just after the formatting is complete.

But, the Fedora partitining utility might be the most confusing, so I recommend the previous suggestions.

[orangeverdancy]

Thanks Danlef, I've downloaded and burned disk 1 of Fedora Core 5 and I got it to boot with the GNU GRUB, but I want to delete all the partitions so then I can use Windows. I can get to the partitions which is 3 lines, one of my Fedora Core 5.img, root, and another with kernel or what not. I hit d to delete them, but they won't stay deleted, what the hell do I do?!

[orangeverdancy]

Ok, correction, just realized that it wasn't booting from the cd correctly and that was just the menu option when Fedora Core boots up.

[orangeverdancy]

Ok, got Linux disc to boot, now I need to know when and how should I exit the Fedora Core 5 installation before it installs and after it removes all partitions from my drive?

[orangeverdancy]

alright, got it to boot and everything, removed all partitions and then stoped before the install, but now Windows XP won't boot, rawr! Help! Please...

[danleff]

Can you be a little more specific? You were able to do a full installation of XP?

What happens when you try to boot to XP?

Did you make one large fat32 partition when deleting the other partitions? Windows wants one partition on the drive that it can see to initiate the installation.

This is why I recommended the other suggestions, rather than the Fedora method.

BTW, what make and model of computer do you have?

If you were able to do a full installation of XP and it will not boot, then pop in the XP disk and allow it to boot to the options menu. Pick "R" for rescue mode. At the resulting command line, issue the fixboot command. When this is finished, issue the fixmbr command and see if this allows a normal XP boot.

Realize,that you must know the administrator password for XP for this to work.

[orangeverdancy]

yeah, sorry about that Danleff I did really explain. Anyway, I went through Fedora Core and chose to remove all partitions. Well now I don't have linux and the only thing on my computer is the GNU GRUB command prompt. I'm not sure how to make a fat32 partition, I don't have the option. I'm going to try to find out what hard drive I have and download the image cd file for it. I have a dell laptop with a 60gb hard drive.

[orangeverdancy]

Ok, I'm in shell when I go into linux recovery mode when booting from the disk. I typed in fdisk -l and received these two devices /dev/sda1 and /dev/sda2. sda1 is under the system Linux and /dev/sda2 is under the system Linux LVM. So what I'm wondering I guess is what am I supossed to do with these, delete them? And how do I make this one big FAT32?

[orangeverdancy]

Alright, also, in the graphical installation it says under LVM Volume Groups I have a VolGroup00 which has LogVol00 and LogVol01. There is also another Hard Drives section that has my /dev/sda which has /dev/sda1 and /dev/sda2 under it. I'd also like to point out that /dev/sda2 device says it has my "Mount Point/RAID/Volume" as VolGroup00, the rest of the devices don't have anything in this section.

[orangeverdancy]

Good news, got it to work, what I did was removed/deleted everything from the custom setup and created only one root (/) partition (I'm still not sure what you meant by fat32). It asked if I really only wanted one partition because it was inefficient or some jazz for linux. Anyway, I hit yes, and then when it was done formatting in the setup I turned off my computer. Now I'm in the Windows XP setup formatting my hard drive and then hopefully installing Windows next. Thanks Danleff!