I have a Dell Inspiron 5100 laptop with Red Hat Enterprise V3 on it. That is the only OP Sys. I want to uninstall Red Hat and install Windows XP Pro. I do not have the Red Hat installation disk. How do I uninstall Red Hat and install Windows. I tried changing the boot sequence to boot from the CD with XP in the drive, but Red Hat does not see the XP CD.

Thanks

First realize that Dell's have a lot of proprietary hardware and may need some drivers installed to function correctly with all your hardware.

When you say that Red Hat does not see the XP disk, do you mean that the cd does not boot, or that XP does not see the hard disk? XP can't see disks partitioned with Linux filesystems. You would need to use a Red Hat boot disk to re-partition the hard drive free of the Linux filesystem, then install XP. The other option is to use the hard drive manufacturer's utility to rid the drive of the Linux partitions. Then install XP.

If the system is set to boot from the CD first and it does not do so, then there is another problem. Red Hat does not take over until the bios loads the actual bootloader.

When I change the boot sequence to boot from CD first, I put the XP CD in the drive and restart. The CD light never comes on and the system boots Red Hat. If I do the same ting except hit F12 on start=up and change the boot sequence, it still boots Red Hat.

Dell tells me I have to use the Red Hat installation disk to uninstall Red Hat, but I do not have that disk. so I need another way to uninstall Red Hat.

Thanks

Can you try another XP CD (or any other bootable CD, like Ubuntu live CD)?

If it boots from there, then your XP CD can be faulty.