Help install windows XP on a Fedora Core 6 Lenovo T60

[pingywon]

I have a Lenovo T60 Thinkpad. I have had Fedora Core 6 running on it for quite some time now.

I have 15 gig of unpartitioned space. I boot to the Windows XP cd ..the preinstall goes fine - as soon as it gets to the part of formatting the HDD for windows ..its tell me "There are no hard drives to install windows to - F3 to reboot"


From inside FC6 I formatted the un parted space to FAT32 - still the same result.


Anyone have an idea/solution?

[saikee]

How about posting here the output of
fdisk -l

[pingywon]

[root@T60 ~]# fdisk -l

Disk /dev/sda: 60.0 GB, 60011642880 bytes
240 heads, 63 sectors/track, 7752 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 15120 * 512 = 7741440 bytes

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sda1 15 7751 58491720 f W95 Ext'd (LBA)
/dev/sda2 * 1 14 105808+ 83 Linux
/dev/sda5 15 5432 40960048+ 83 Linux
/dev/sda6 5433 5571 1050808+ 82 Linux swap / Solaris
/dev/sda7 5572 7751 16480768+ b W95 FAT32

Partition table entries are not in disk order
[root@T60 ~]#

[saikee]

You need to make sda1 active.

Fire up a grub shell in Fedora or any Linux Live cd and use Grub to make 1st partition of the ist disk active.

grub
root (hd0,0)
nakeactive
quit

XP's MBR mission is to boot whichever of sda1, sda2, sda3 and sda4 is active. It tried sda2 but could not recognise it because it is a Linux partition.

[pingywon]

You need to make sda1 active.

Fire up a grub shell in Fedora or any Linux Live cd and use Grub to make 1st partition of the ist disk active.

grub
root (hd0,0)
nakeactive
quit

XP's MBR mission is to boot whichever of sda1, sda2, sda3 and sda4 is active. It tried sda2 but could not recognise it because it is a Linux partition.

I'll give that a goe ...theres no real chance of me hosing anything else by doing this is there?

Im not pro enuff to fix it if I kill it .....

[pingywon]

grub
root (hd0,0)
nakeactive
quit

can you double check this for me .... i have a SATA drive in this thing


grub> root (hd0,0)
command came back and said:

Filesystem type unknown, partition type 0xf

[saikee]

Sorry, I misread the partition information thinking you may have installed XP in sda1.

From my experience on the standard XP installation (without an existing Dos system) XP needs to be installed in a "primary" partition which can be either one of sda1, sda2 sda3 and sda4.

Your sda1 is the envelope bordering defining the border between sda5 and sda7 originally. AN extended partition cannot be booted and has no storage of its own. It is just a mechanism to permit up to 11 logical partitions inside.

I think you need to use Fedora's fdisk to delete sda7, which is a logical partition XP does not like.

You then use fdisk to create a primary partition in the next empty slot which should be sda3 using the identical space. You can specify the type b or c for the fat32 filing system ( I think Type c supports LBA and should be used here). MaKe this partition active.

On a reboot XP installer will see the sda3 and install itself in the "C" drive there.

I think XP can only be installed into a logical partition if there is an existing "C" drive, like from a Dos partition, so that it can install the NTLDR boot loader to.

I believe your XP installation was incomplete and if XP's MBR has been implemented then there is no supporting files of NTLDR to be found, as XP does not support Linux and would not be able to read Linux partitions of Type 83.

[pingywon]

I thank you for your time.

I never got to install XP - I have had FC6 running for sometime now. When XP boots off the CD ..it loads crap into RAM and then prepares to find a disk and format it. This is where my original issue begins.

I think at this point Im going to wait 2 more days - and format the whole laptop for FC7 and do the install right (correctly then)

[saikee]

No you don't need to do it that way.

The safest way to install XP is to have a "promary" NTFS partition created first and its installer will go straight into it, asking something like "shall I install here"

Remember Gparted and Parted Magic have Live CD which can reliably resize and move NTFS partitions. Thus you can have freedom to rearrange the various partition later on.

To have hda3 at the end of the disk does have the following drawback

(1) The order of the partitions appear random but that is perfectly safe and acceptable in operation.

(2) hda3 blocks the termination point of the extended partition. This make it difficult to have more logical partitions in future but it isn't impossible, just needs more work.

(3) XP may possibly perform better if you installed it in first position of the disk but it will work in any of the hda2 to hda4.