I would like to state how awesome

[Dimzamatic]

It is that my intel 5100 wifi card just will not work. I have a laptop with zero wireless capability. On the one rare time i did get it to work. I had to reformat because it completely disabled my ethernet card so i could no longer use wired.

So i would just like to say thats super rad. Ohhh and the best part is that when i go to dban (boot and nuke) my hardrive....it won't freaking let me. If i try to just reformat with a legit copy of windows vista (What came installed on my now 4 month old 1300.00 laptop) It says that my hard drive has a shrunken partition ( from suse) and it can't overwrite it. And if i dual boot instead i got a crcdisk.sys error and windows hangs at loading screen. Can't even boot in safe mode.

FREAKING AWESOME!

So no wireless, cant play left 4 dead or any of my steam games or run ventrilo. Some burned movies will not play do to codec errors. I can't use my homescan anymore to get return points from buying groceries. Can't run itunes and load songs on my ipod without going through hell. And 100 more things i won't even bother listing.

And i can't even reformat back to freaking windows!!!!
I might as well use this laptop to bludgeon myself to death with now since its of zero use.

[caf4926]

Boot a live cd and open a terminal type su and hit enter a couple of times
Now type

fdisk -l

post the result here

There is a possibility we can see the problem from this. If that fails I would suggest Parted Magic to format the disk

[Dimzamatic]

linux-qtth:/home/dimz # fdisk -l

Disk /dev/sda: 320.0 GB, 320072933376 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 38913 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x62bfdcb2

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sda1 1 262 2104483+ 82 Linux swap / Solaris
/dev/sda2 * 263 2873 20972857+ 83 Linux
/dev/sda3 2874 38913 289491300 83 Linux

Im pretty sure this laptop just hates me.

[caf4926]

There are no windows partitions there, just Linux.

If you want vista back, you need an install disk. if that's what you want to do, I can walk you through it.

[Dimzamatic]

Ive been trying to reformat and it won't let me. Also what about the crcdisk.sys error that freezes the computer when it tries to load the windows OS? I think the crcdisk.sys error is a Sata driver error. I am not sure though.

Also I would like to run xp instead of vista yet there is a sound card issue that prevented me from doing that last time. Everything worked but my sound. No idea why, so i gave up.

[caf4926]

Download Parted magic

Boot it and start the Failsafe option. It will eject the cd at some point. Then at the prompt type: menu

On the Desktop click the Partitioner

Use this to delete all your partitions and create one new Primary partition, it can be just the size you want for XP, and format as ntfs. If you only use part of the space Leave the remaining space free if you plan to install Linux later.

apply
it takes a few mins

when it's done - shutdown

Boot with the XP cd and select the partition you just created and let xp format it again ntfs quick format.

away you go install xp