I recently bought a dell inspiron 1545(i believe) that came with ubuntu.
I really want to format it to windows XP, but i am having trouble with that.
First of all, i stick the cd in the drive, ubuntu doesnt read it.(obviously)
Secondly, i boot from the CD, it turns BSOD(blue screen of death) when it is loading the drivers..
And i am stuck there, usually when i format my computer, or a friend’s computer would run smoothly after I boot it from CD but in this case, all the windows XP cd i boot from turns BSOD when it is loading up the drivers.
How would I make this laptop windows XP?
What? Shouldn’t it have the capabilities to run XP? It has a hard-drive does it not? It should be possible to erase that OS, and install a new one.
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2 responses so far ↓
1 john s // Jul 23, 2009
did you ever think hey maybe this computer is built only for linux?
haha
search the error code and maybe its like the hdd or something just not being compatible
2 CrasH // Jul 23, 2009
You may be facing a hardware problem, though I don’t feel as though you are based on what you’ve said thus far. Try using gparted (google it). It’s a live linux distribution that starts the gparted partition editor. Shrink the Ubuntu partition (likely the only one unless Dell did it right and put the swap, root, and /usr/home on their own partitions). Then go ahead and create a FAT 32 partition for Windows. Now try installing Windows from your disk. If this doesn’t work, try again, only instead of FAT 32, make an NTFS partition.
My best guess as to why the system is BSOD on you as it tries to load the drivers is that Win XP cannot natively read linux file formats (ext2, ext3, ReiserFS, etc.), so as it tries to read from the hard drive to then show you the partition structure, it fails to understand it and blue screens. Preemptively adding an XP friendly partition may help with this.
If not, you may be facing a hardware issue in that your HD may be SATA and XP can’t read/write SATA hard drives during install. As you likely don’t have a floppy drive to load the drivers on demand, you’ll likely need to slip-stream the drivers into XP and burn as its own install disc. Google will help you here, as methods evolve over time.
PS–Ubuntu may have the gparted program pre-installed for you. Look for it before wasting a CD on it, though it is a good utility to have on hand.
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