Win XP hangs after Setup is checking your hardware configuration...on Dual boot Fedora Core 3 Dell I

[svini]

Okay, I'm getting very frustrated with this problem. My Dell laptop
crashed, and it said that the system file is corrupted and that I need
to insert the XP2 CD that came with the laptop. After booting with
that, it just hangs after "Setup is checking your hardware
configuration".
I then try booting with Knoppix, access my windows partition, backup my
files onto my Fedora Core 3 partition and format the Windows partition
to FAT32. I try booting the XP CD again, and it still gives me the same
problem. Upgrading my BIOS doesnt help either.

What I fail to understand is, why does my XP2 CD still hang like that
and how are the other linux CDs and my Dell drivers CDs booting?

I would really appreciate it, if someone manages to figure out this
problem!
Heeeeeeeeeelp!
-Svini

 

[Guest]

Why format in FAT32,xp and vista by default run in ntfs.

 

[svini]

No special reason. Thought it might help in a dual boot system. But
thats not really where the problem lies...is there?

 

[wtmitchell]

I'm having the same problem with both WinXP HomeEdition and WinXP Pro installations on one machine which until recently was running WinXP. The short story is so far it looks like it might be due to a hardware error on one of the disk partitions.

The longer story is (so far) that the disk currently has four partitions
sda1: 9.32gb ext3 (Ubuntu linux installed)
sda2: 69.85gb ntfs (formerly had WinXP installed)
sda3: 69.85gb ntfs (formerly had some files on it)
sda4. 39.22mb linux-swap an undersized swap partion

"#dd if=/dev/sda2 >/dev/null" failed with an I/O error after reading 6417728 records, 3285872648 bytes (3.3GB)
"#dd if=/dev/sda3 >/dev/null" succeeded, reading 101233761 records, 51831685128 bytes (52GB)

Those numbers don't make sense to me, but it seems clear that there's an error on partion 2.

My next step will be to delete partition 2 and try another WinXP install, on partition 3 if I get that far, or perhaps to try a manual format of the suspect partition using the WinXP repair console (if I can figure out how to go about doing that). I'm posting these partial results here in case I don't get around to doing that for a while.

 

[wtmitchell]

Well, no joy. I removed both partitions 2 and 3 and WinXP installation still hangs. It displays the "Setup is inspecting your hardware configuration.." message and, after a few seconds, blanks the screen and hangs.

FWIW, the partition table looks like the following

0100 0001 fe83 ffff 003f 0000 1481 012a
0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000
0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000
fe00 ffff fe82 ffff 50fc 12a0 39c5 0001