I guess I'll need a boot disk?

I have another laptop with Win2K, but can't create boot disk.

I basically want to change the Linux laptop into an XP one, but can't seem to get the installation from CD rom to work, so I guess I need to format the hard disk first?

the xp cdrom should be bootable, so just goto the bios and select the cdrom drive as the 1st boot. once you are in xp setup, you can delete the partitions, etc.

when I boot from the XP cd rom, it just hangs after saying 'booting from cdrom...'

I guess there is some safey mechanism on Linux to prevent over-writes?

shouldn't be...

sounds more like your xp cd is dodgy...

otherway to do it is to make a bootable floppy disk with cdrom drivers, fdisk.exe and format.com .

(you can get floppy disk images from http://www.bootdisk.com/)

boot off the floppy, run fdisk, delete all non-dos partitions, create a dos partition and then format it (make it bootable). you might also have to run fdisk /mbr (to remove lilo). then goto the xp cdrom and run setup .



[Edited by snowcrash - 1/7/2003 5:44:55 PM]

[Edited by snowcrash - 1/7/2003 6:23:17 PM]

Snowcrash,

This CD-ROM has worked in other laptops (same spec), but using different OS's. Its just not happy with Linux.

I couldn't find a bootdisk image from that website!

Thanks for your help anyway...

sorry fixed url now... doh !