I have a hp pavilion zv6000 laptop that had Windows XP installed. I downloaded openSuse, burned into a DVD, installed it on my laptop. I wanted to have a partition for XP and Suse, but made the mistake of wiping out XP. So, when my laptop turns on, Suse (KDE) runs and everything is good. Now I want to partition my hard drive and have xp and suse on there. How do I reinstall XP on the computer? I have the XP OS reinstallation CD that came with my laptop. Any help here will be greatly appreciated.
Ensure you have all important data backed up OFF of your PC to some backup media. You will likely lose Linux in this process.
I suspect all you may need to do is boot to your winXP CD, and when given the choice, delete all the Linux partitions, and install winXP on the entire hard drive.
After you have winXP set up how you want, re-install opeSUSE, but this time pay closer attention to the openSUSE installation menu, to ensure it does not wipe out winXP.
You may want to wait a bit before starting, to see if anyone else has some more specific tidbits of advice that I over looked mentioning.
XP can be pretty funny dealing with Linux partitions - it should be able to delete them, but definitely don’t try to resize them or anything.
If you want to do that, use a Linux live CD.
Probably, if you don’t have data to save, your easiest bet is to use the XP CD to delete everything on the disk, then try to install Windows only taking up half of it (if it lets you), then reinstall SUSE in the space - it should handle the booting automatically if you put grub on the MBR.
Thanks for your advice. I placed the XP CD in the laptop and turned it on. The screen stated “Press any key to enter Setup…” and I pressed enter. Then a message came up stating something about checking hardware configuration, and then a blank screen. The laptop hung. Any additional advice or workaround?
Personally, I’d just make a linux live CD - they’re extremely useful to have lying around anyway. Doesn’t really matter which one - there are utility CDs like gparted live designed for exactly this kind of thing, but a normal distro (like a SUSE live CD) would work just as well…
Use that to delete everything and start from scratch.