Need to re-install Windows

[cornishman]

I am primarily a Mac user running OS X for my work as a photographer, however, I do have a PC laptop that ran Windows XP home for about 3 years until I lost patience with Windows and decided to give Kubuntu a try. Switching over to Kubuntu was pretty easy, however, I now have to do some web design work and really need the option of viewing those web sites on I.E 6 for Windows to see how they show up.

The problem is that I have formatted the drive a dozen times now and re-installed Windows on several occasions with apparently no issues, but on restart all I get is an error message saying "GRUB Loading stage 1.5." followed by "GRUB Loading, please wait... Error 17". That's as far as it ever gets and I've been struggling with this now for weeks with no luck. It seems possible to re-install Kubuntu but its almost like Windows just won't install properly once Kubuntu has been on the drive regardless of how I try to format it. Does anybody have any suggestions to unblock this before I give up completely and have to buy another PC?

[penguin.ch]

Re: Need to re-install Windows

Does anybody have any suggestions to unblock this before I give up completely and have to buy another PC?

I'd rather settle for reinstalling Kubuntu featuring VMware and Windoze as a so-called guest system inside the latter - which should fulfill all your needs on what I would call a sustained basis ... further reading 8)

[cornishman]

Re: Need to re-install Windows

I know what you mean about maintaining Windows on a sustainable basis. No matter how much I tried I just couldn't bring myself to like Windows but unfortunately as Steve Jobs keeps reminding us, we live in a Windows world and anybody trying to do web design without taking proper account of I.E 6 for Windows is simply ignoring the gorilla in the room.

My laptop is rather underpowered old Acer with very limited disk space, so I can't really try anything too fancy here since it struggled for drive space with Windows alone following all the endless security and virus updates. I'll give your suggestion a try though if it proves impossible to run Windows in the normal way. Something must be wrong though right now because in theory Windows is installed and Kubuntu has been wiped but from what I have read these error messages are not Windows based.

[mbjsscn2]

Re: Need to re-install Windows

The problem is that I have formatted the drive a dozen times now and re-installed Windows on several occasions with apparently no issues, but on restart all I get is an error message saying "GRUB Loading stage 1.5." followed by "GRUB Loading, please wait... Error 17". That's as far as it ever gets and I've been struggling with this now for weeks with no luck. It seems possible to re-install Kubuntu but its almost like Windows just won't install properly once Kubuntu has been on the drive regardless of how I try to format it.

Two suggestions:

I have had this error before. It is possible to edit the corrupted GRUB files in the master boot record but I find editing GRUB a pain so I'd use a windows boot disc and do 'fdisk /mbr' - I am sure others will suggest other ways of clearing the master boot record but a windows boot disc will do the job

I too need to see how web pages will look in IE - so I installed IE on Kubuntu using this guide -
http://www.psychocats.net/ubuntu/ies4linux

Regards
ChrisN

[fleamailman]

Re: Need to re-install Windows

How good are you with a screwdriver, because one of the easiest things is just to take out the harddrive, borrow a friend's external harddrive caddie and on branching it too a USB port of a computer running XP, one then just runs disk manager(diskmgmt.msc in the runbox) and formats the drive from there, once done one then returns it to ones original computer; ah and if we are talking about a desktop it is even easier because one can just slave the drive in another computer to do the same process though one needs to check the jumpers.

Sorry if the above sounds too much, there is probably something like Partition Magic which one could boot up on to wipe the drive, some googling is called for.

[cornishman]

Re: Need to re-install Windows

Well I ran the 'fdisk /mbr' command from the bootable disk which didn't seem to do anything at first but a quick Google revealed that I just needed to reboot after that. Ten minutes later I had network issues, programmes not responding, numerous restarts and a screaming headache, so I guess I am back in Windows!!

At a later date I shall re-install Kubuntu because this is harmful to my sanity but for the moment I just need to see a few web sites on I.E 6. Many thanks for all the help