Hard Drive problem

[the-matrix]

Error message : Strike F1 to retry to boot or F2 to utility setup i can`t instal XP again dell say it because suse is still on my pc please help me so i can delete suse? Anyway xp is gone and i erase it with Webroot harddisk eraser.

First : XP Home

Second : Suse 10.2

Dimension 4600

Hard Drive Western Digital 200GB

[bonestonne]

well, it would be tricky to reinstall XP on a dual boot machine.

1) XP likes to format the whole disk unless you're sneaky and prevent that from happening

2) you'll loose any data you have on there unless you can access the partition with Suse, which is doubtable, linux doesn't recognise NTFS without a special driver, and you'd have issues with it even if you could see the partition.

if you have an XP install CD, the only way to make it work would be keeping XP on the same partition it was on.

was your boot menu messed up any? i remember trying to fix my friends computer with an issue like this, we ended up formatting the whole drive and reinstalling from scratch.

part of the problem with this is that when you dual boot you need to install windows first, and if you have linux on there before XP, basically all you can do is format the whole disk.

you could try making it a slave in another computer that runs windows to recover data, but the best and easiest way out of this is a full format and reinstall.