OFF-TOPIC: Fedora 7 already installed, can't install XP on empty partition

[Tom Horsley]

On Fri, 10 Aug 2007 18:07:13 -0300
"André Costa" <blueser at gmail.com> wrote:

> BUT... I need this machine to dual-boot to Windows XP (still addicted
> to some Windows-only games =( ). XP setup CD hangs just after showing
> "examining hardware configuration" or something like that. It doesn't
> really hangs, it just switches to a blank screen and sits there
> forever (I already left it there for more than 15min to no avail).
> Keyboard is responsive and HD led stays on. CTRL+ALT+DEL reboots as
> expected.

I had exactly this problem with a machine with nvidia chipset and sata
disks. Turned out if there was an ext3 partition anywhere on any of the
disks the XP installer acted exactly as you describe. It would hang
much faster than I could even hit the function key to tell it I had
a driver disk.

At some point I needed to reinstall everything from scratch, so I erased
all the partitions on all the disks, installed Windows XP first, then
installed linux. It works fine now - it was just the installer barfing.