[tomthedrummer1992]

A nuke?

[Cew27]

boot and nuke/dban it will completely wipe your harddrive, it is an iso that you burn to a disk and boot from, then do a fresh install

[tomthedrummer1992]

The hard drive is already wiped clean of any OS.

[Cew27]

ok, well someone else will have to takeover from here as my resources are exhausted

[tomthedrummer1992]

I have now deleted the XP partition using the XP Pro CD I have (got to the stage where it showed existing partitions and deleted the XP Pro partition) leaving 11GB unpartitioned space then exiting the setup. Maybe it can’t create a swap because there is no partition for it to create a swap onto.

Should I create a partition using that XP CD, then exit (so I have a partition on there), and then try the win 2k installer again?


Tom

[Cew27]

if it ask you where to put the swap partition make a partition for swap, about 300meg and then select that as swap but usually it makes the swap partition for you

[Desertfish]

Could be wrong about this, but as far as I'm aware off what is being referred to as the swap partition is usually called the PageFile. This should be be allocated automatically during the install.

The only reado why you would have to createa seperate partition for this is if you're having multiple harddrives and want the put the PageFile on a seperate drive (not partition but a different physical drive) in order to improve Windows performance. If you only have 1 physical drive you might as well not bother and let Windows do it's thing.

I've installed Win2K and WinXP on different machines so many times I lost count of it, but never did I need a bootable floppy for this. Also, the fact that the system is having problems with Linux Distro's is somewhat worrying.

i'm not a Linu expert, but if you still have problems, I would recommend you get hold of OpenSUSE 10.2 or 10.3 and install that on your system. If no luck, you can use the OpenSUSE CD/DVD to run the memory test an the firmware test. Also, whn you boot OpenSUSE and press ESC during the boot-up process, the system will tell you what it's doing and where things are going wrong.

[tomthedrummer1992]

Just an update, got it sorted with windows 2k. Went into FDISK and sorted it that way.

[Desertfish]

Hmm... Don't create any partition. Just try and install XP on your 11GB drive and see what happens. If you still got the same problem you might want to check your system memory and your harddrive.

Basically, Windows is using what is called a PageFile which does exactly the same thing as the Linux Swap file. It is virtual memory that is allocated on your hard drive. Linux does create an etra partition for this. In it's default installation, Windows will use the C:\ drive. You can only move the location of the PageFile once Windows is installed and then again, you would only do that onto a different physical HD in order to get a performance increase. So on a laptop with only one HD in there, you might as well not bother and let Windows do it's thing.

Now I'm not sure if Windows does use the HD or the system memory as a Swap during installation, hence I'm saying it could either be a problem with the HD or the memory.

Maybe you could use a Linux distro in order to do your troubelshooting. I kow that OpenSUSE provides you the option do do a memory test and a firmware test, but at 2GB+ for 10.2 and 4GB+ for version 10.3 it seems a bit of a big download.

Maybe Cew27 can assist with this one. He's the Linux guru here as far as I know. Maybe he knows of another Linus Distro that fits on one CD and which also provides a mem-test and firmware test.

Cheers:
Chris.