neither xp nor linux will reinstall

welshy

Baseband Member
Messages
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Hi there, im kind of having a mini crisis here. I installed linux, which kind of worked, just wouldnt boot up after restarting, not would it detect xp pro,so i formatted th hard drive and tried to start afresh. Linux will no longer install, it just gives me an error about sum timeout with th DMA, after th KUBUNTU progress bar bit (am/was trying to install kubuntu 6.06). .

Windows has also accumulated its own annoying error. Th pc starts up, says: press any key to boot from CD, so i do, then it inspects the hardware configuration, then th blue screen comes up. Its really strange, because it loads about 30 / 40 things before th menu to install it comes up, but th first time i tried to install it afresh yesterday, it would load all of them, get to the menu, then freeze upon copying files to the hard drive, 2nd time, would not quite finish loading all the 30 or so things, 3rd time, bout 25, fourth even less, and now it just stops at the kernel debugger dll, and says something about erroe 14, and failed to load something. It cant be the cd, a) cos it does the same with 3 seperate XP pro discs, and b) would it not stop at the smae place everytime?

this is soooo furstrating now, cos neither XP or Linux will install.

(p.s. it seems to be fine on my bros p.c, if i put my hard drive in there, itll load th linux live cd up no problem, as it did 1st time on my pc) and i would try and install it on the hard drive in his pc, then just put th hard drive in my pc, but im guessing that this would just screw it up, and not work, and therefore be a further waste of time, plus, it only has th option to use the whole of the hard disk, but i also want to install xp. (his is an intel p4,256mb of ram, mines an amd 3000, 1gb ram)

thanks again
welshy

(p.s. sorry for th essay)
 
1st. Install win xp before you install kubuntu. Because if you install kubuntu 1st, it will install grub. Then you install windows after that, and it overwrites grub with it's own boot loader. Which (of course) won't detect that linux is there.
But grub detects other operating systems too.

So with kubuntu you can't even get to live cd part?
Try running stuff like memtest (I think kubuntu live cd has it) to check the ram.
It's definitely not the hard drive since linux live cd will work fine even without a hard drive.
 
cheers mammikoura,

ill give th memtest thing a go

ive also just ran maxtor's hard drive diagnostic thing, and acording to that the hard drive is failing, could this be anything to do with the problem at all? (either windows or linux?)

cheers again
welshy
 
hmm, if the diagnostics tool says the hdd is failing then it could be the problem. Try unplugging the hdd and then booting the computer with linux live cd. It should work fine without the hdd. Though I'm just wondering why it didn't work at 1st if it was the hdd. Maybe it just tried to run off of the pagefile of the hdd and that is the reason it didn't work. :S

but give it a try without the hdd being connected to the mobo.
 
I thought it was the cd drive, so i changed it and it seemed to work better, but still windowns wouldnt install. i also ran th maxtor test on a second maxtor hard drive, which also said that this 2nd drive was failing. I tried swapping th hard drives round, and ended up with both in th p4 machine. Cant install windows on either, but can install Linux only on one of them, and it has just booted up by itself. Ill give it a few days, and see how everything works, out, and try installing windows again, but i think i may end up having to buy a new hard drive.

cheers for your help ;)
welshy
 
one last question if I may, the main pc in my house, has 120gb hard drive, of which only 80gb is showing up. I think in a moment of madness I may accidentally created a partition on the hard drive. Is there any way that i can remove this partition without losing everything that is on the hard drive? It may be formatted for use with linux, but im nopt 100% sure as it was only a couple of days ago that i relaised there was 40gb of space missing :s

cheers again
welshy ;)
 
so how far does the windows installation go? If it gets to the partition part then you should be able to delete partitions there. When you delete the partition all data on that partition is gone, but other partitions remain fine. So just be sure to delete the right partition. I'm not that experienced with linux so I don't know how to delete partitions from there.
 
cheers;) i'll try that mammikoura. I didn't get as far as installing linux on this th main p.c., so theres just a random 40gb missing (tht windows wont pick up) so ill try tht or try and download a partition manager or something


On the 2 'borken' pc's itll go to the parition manager, then you tell it to format the hard drife fors nfts (full) and it says that it can;t complete it. I;ll just buy a new hard drive and try it from there, they arent all that expensive after all.

cheers for all your help ;)
welshy
 
welshy said:
cheers;) i'll try that mammikoura. I didn't get as far as installing linux on this th main p.c., so theres just a random 40gb missing (tht windows wont pick up) so ill try tht or try and download a partition manager or something

Also check from the disk manager that the whole hdd is formatted. Can't really explain well where to find the disk manager, but it's somewhere in the control panel and then admin tools or something like that (I don't have an english version of win xp so pretty hard to start guessing the names)
If it's not formatted yet then you can just make it into a drive and format it.

welshy said:
On the 2 'borken' pc's itll go to the parition manager, then you tell it to format the hard drife fors nfts (full) and it says that it can;t complete it. I;ll just buy a new hard drive and try it from there, they arent all that expensive after all.

cheers for all your help ;)
welshy

tried quick format? Though I doubt it'll work either. And if the maxtor test says that the hdd is failing then it's probably a good idea to buy a new one. (and check if you have warranty left, because then you would get a new one for free) Personally I have some quite bad experiences from maxtor drives, my drive failed but the test wouldn't pick up any problems. Still got it replaced though, and it took like 5 weeks to get it back.
 
mammikoura, it doesn't matter if MBR from XP overwrites GRUB. You can go put the Linux CD in again, and just install the bootloader, and it will overwrite the MBR. It really doesn't matter what order you put them on there. Just make sure you know how big each partition should be.
 
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