Guest burn Posted October 10, 2007 Report Share Posted October 10, 2007 hi guys!, i am new here. i have got a problem. i was having windows XP installed on my PC and was working fine. i installled mandriva 2007 on my one of the partitions. then i thought of reinstalling XP and keep mandriva in dual boot. i deleted my Xp partition and started installation of XP. so set up copied file and when the time to choose and format the partition came, the problem started. the system replied to me that "the partition which i am choosing to install XP is not XP compatible and i should go back, delete one of the partition and format again." i went back, deleted and formatted with fat32 file system. i tried all the things. but nothing worked. i cant install XP now. The same "the partition which i am choosing to install XP is not XP compatible and i should go back, delete one of the partition and format again." message i am getting again and again. i just cant installl XP now. please help me. i have following system configuration: Intel P4. 2.66 GHz 80 GB HDD 1 GB ram. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
darkscot Posted October 10, 2007 Report Share Posted October 10, 2007 I suggest you boot up the Live CD version Mandriva and look at your partitions using Gparted (partition editor). You should be able to use that to sort out the partitions and reformat your drive. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Reiver_Fluffi Posted October 10, 2007 Report Share Posted October 10, 2007 Let me guess, the windows was on the first partition. I have had this before, windows seems to dislike it, you try to replace the partition, and a random area of 8MB or so hangs their in no mans land. Never found a way out of it other than to totally wipe the partition table and start again. I tend to keep linux and windows on separate drive, only because Windows can be such a pain sometimes Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
pmpatrick Posted October 10, 2007 Report Share Posted October 10, 2007 I've had similar experiences as well. Sometimes even deleting all the partitions doesn't work and windows will balk at creating a new partition for a fresh install. The partition table is probably pretty screwed up between the partitioning operations performed by linux and windows during their respective installs. Go to the hard drive manufacturer's website and download their hard drive diagnostic utilities. They are usually available on a bootable iso for cd-r or floppy image. These utilities usually contain a zero fill utility, sometimes called a low level format utility. This utility will write zeroes to every sector on your hard drive and leave it in the same condition as when it left the factory. You will lose all data on the drive after a zero fill but sometimes it's the only way to recover from a really borked partition table. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
scarecrow Posted October 10, 2007 Report Share Posted October 10, 2007 (edited) If you add a new partition with some others already existing, windoze installer routine will ALWAYS create it as extended and will reserve 8MB at the start of the drive for a simple reason: The primary windoze bootloader wantrs to install in a primary and active partition. Of course, you can use cfdisk prior to installing windoze to create a new primary partition, and then tell the installer to do its homework on the existing partition (allowing it at most to format it as NTFS). Edited October 10, 2007 by scarecrow Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest burn Posted October 11, 2007 Report Share Posted October 11, 2007 I've had similar experiences as well. Sometimes even deleting all the partitions doesn't work and windows will balk at creating a new partition for a fresh install. The partition table is probably pretty screwed up between the partitioning operations performed by linux and windows during their respective installs.Go to the hard drive manufacturer's website and download their hard drive diagnostic utilities. They are usually available on a bootable iso for cd-r or floppy image. These utilities usually contain a zero fill utility, sometimes called a low level format utility. This utility will write zeroes to every sector on your hard drive and leave it in the same condition as when it left the factory. You will lose all data on the drive after a zero fill but sometimes it's the only way to recover from a really borked partition table. my problem is same as pmpatrick has told. so wat should I do? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
scarecrow Posted October 11, 2007 Report Share Posted October 11, 2007 my problem is same as pmpatrick has told. so wat should I do? 1. Reading the previous comments... 2. Creating the windoze NTFS partition within Linux, using cfdisk or gparted, or qtparted (or diskdrake, if using Mandriva) 3. Booting from the windoze installation CD, and installing to the already existing windoze partition, without recreating it (and possibly reformatting it). Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
emmanuel_uk Posted October 12, 2007 Report Share Posted October 12, 2007 if gparted / cfdisk etc do not work, before getting the HD manufacturer utility, maybe look in the bios if there is a low level format option (I have one for a raid card) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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