Can't install XP after having Ubuntu installed for 3 days.

[starriol]

OK, so I've been using this oldie PC for 5 years now, with XP.

I decided to try Ubuntu on it, didn't serve my purpose, so I went to install XP SP3.
After eliminating the partitions and formating a big one, the installation copied files and showed the usual "will reboot in 10 secs".
It does, I don't boot from the CD again, just continue the installation as usual, goes again to load drivers and BAM, restart.

It's in this loop ever since.

I tried with an old copy of Windows without SP, nothing, same issue.

What might be happening??? Anything left from GRUB??

I need help, I need this PC running ASAP.

Thanks guys!

 

[Matt1970]

Boot to the XP cd and at the first screen, hit R and go to the recovery console. You usually have to select 1 enter and the enter twice.
Run Chkdsk /f
Now run fixboot.
Then Reboot to cd, delete any existing partitions then do a regular (unconditional) NTFS format, not the quick format. That should do it.

 

[SickBeast]

Grub should typically be overwritten by the Windows installation.

I've never heard of problems like this before. I doubt it has anything to do with Ubuntu.

 

[postmortemIA]

Grub should typically be overwritten by the Windows installation.

I've never heard of problems like this before. I doubt it has anything to do with Ubuntu.

I don't think so, linux boot loaders and changes they make to MBR (such as switch to non-existing partition as active) may be nasty to remove.

I recommend writing all 0s to drive. there's freeware for doing so.

 

[lxskllr]

I don't think so, linux boot loaders and changes they make to MBR (such as switch to non-existing partition as active) may be nasty to remove.

I recommend writing all 0s to drive. there's freeware for doing so.

I've never had issues using Windows after Linux, and in any case, that's not what's going on here. He's already past the boot stage. Maybe his Windows CD is messed up.

Edit:
Hmm... I forgot he's tried 2 CDs. Maybe ram... In any case, it's not grub.

 

[Nothinman]

Yea, if it's formatted the filesystem and booted into the second stage of the installer properly then there should be nothing left of Linux on there so this is purely a Windows or hardware fail. You could try running DBAN on the drive if you really want to be 100% sure Ubuntu is gone, but I doubt that will help.

 

[Matt1970]

I don't think that there is anyhing left of the Linux, I think his file structure got goofed up and quick formats aren't got to fix it.

 

[Modelworks]

I have seen this quite a bit. It happens when a linux or other OS changes the sectors in a way that windows can't understand. It can cause windows to do everything from just hanging at detecting the drive to BSOD.

The easiest way to fix it is boot with a linux live cd. Go to a terminal prompt and type:
dd if=/dev/null of=/dev/sdX bs=446 count=1

Replace the X in sdX with the drive causing problems.


Below will remove the partition table as well if they are the issue so don't use it if there are multiple partitions you need to keep.
dd if=/dev/null of=/dev/sdX bs=512 count=1

 

[Nothinman]

I don't think that there is anyhing left of the Linux, I think his file structure got goofed up and quick formats aren't got to fix it.

The only difference between a quick and full format in Windows is a bad block check, it doesn't do anything extra to the filesystem data itself.

 

[lord_emperor]

www.dban.org

Never heard a reasonable explanation for the problem you have, but this fixes it.

 

[bankster55]

I'll just throw this on the table fwiw

Roughly 2 years ago I discovered GParted and started to use it for all my NTFS formatting/partitioning for my WINDOWS drives. This utility offered a lot more flexibility and options than what i regularly used.

Then as it happens, I suffered a HDD crash and subsequent corruption of partition table. So I employed PartitionTableDoctor to rebuild the table. And much to my surprise it found two linux ext3 partitions. I had 4 primary partitions on my HDD but PREVIOUSLY I had 2 primaries and one extended with 2 logicals.
Note that PTDD finds all MBR copies and possible previous incarnations of partitioning hanging around - beginning, middle or end of drive.

Now the HDD with 4 primaries worked fine with the GParted ntfs formatted drives I made, as did the older GParted config of 2 prim and 2 logicals. And obviously, no Win format will ever see ext3 partitions, hidden or otherwise. So I checked some of my other drives and sure enough they all had those linux tiny bookends. Then I looked in killdisk windows (not DOS) and likewise they were there also. They did not show in any HDD I formatted with Windows utilities in PTDD. Never made a GPT drive either at any time.

So then I googled it and found some links to guys with linux laptops that couldnt load Windows after format, and killdisk fixed the prob. Its important to note that the 7MB "partitions" were not being USED, or detected by Windows but they were THERE!!

So I immediately killdisked all my HDD and started using diskpart exclusively. Never to see those linux 7MB parts again.
And never to use GParted again either.
Freaked me out.
Looks like its some kind of file table area?

Can any of you Linux guys add some enlightenment here?

 

[Nothinman]

That's most likely scanning the whole disk for the magic numbers at the beginning of a filesystem and giving you the option to restore it. The magic numbers still exist because they haven't been overwritten by file data yet, just deleting a partition doesn't actually remove any data and creating a new filesystem only overwrites whatever data happens to be in the same spot as the new filesystems structures, in this case the NTFS MFT.

Notice how the two ext3 filesystem labels are gibberish? That's because that part of the filesystem did get overwritten by something already. Either that or the ext3 filesystems that it found aren't real and they're just in the list because some file or random data on the hard disk was coincidentally the same as the ext3 filesystem magic. Especially since they're both 7M, a filesystem that size would be pretty useless.

 

[bankster55]

"magic" numbers?

So what about this situation can explain why Windows wont install without writing zeros to a HDD with this stuff hanging around?

 

[Nothinman]

"magic" numbers?

So what about this situation can explain why Windows wont install without writing zeros to a HDD with this stuff hanging around?

Well magic string would be more accurate, but yes, magic. Or I guess you could call them a a signature, header or version string depending on the context. Every filesystem has a FAT, MFT, superblock, etc that describes the filesytem version, features, size, etc. Those tables vary in location from filesystem to filesystem. In NTFS the MFT is offset quite a bit from the beginning of the filesystem, I believe extX have a header and superblock at the very beginning and then duplicate it across several of the block groups later in the filesystem, XFS starts it's superblock at block 0 of the filesystem but doesn't do any backups AFAIK.

If you have a Linux machine handy run 'man file' and it'll tell you how it determines a file's type, all of the magic numbers included with the system should be in /usr/share/misc/magic.mgc which is now a binary file it seems although it was a plain text file a while back.