On 18 November 2007, Alain Spineux aspineux at gmail.com wrote: <snip>

I remember a got this problem multiple time. The XP CD (and also self made autoinstall CD) was refusing to boot if the HD was allready partitioned with an "incompatible" fdisk tool. It was usually on test machine and I had not problem doing a dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda bs=512 and then reinstall all the machine from scratch, or if the installed OS were important then I used some imaging or backup tools. But the

reset of the

partition was mandatory. You could try to use the very powerful BartPE live CD do restore your DLL.

Alain: Thank you for recommending BartPE! I downloaded BartPE on this side of the box (CentOS 5), but I couldn't unzip it in Linux. I moved it over to our Windows ME box and unzipped it there. Since I cannot start WinXP on this box, I can't run BartPE on this box at this time. I was hoping BartPE would ask me to let it read the WinXP files from the CD (on the WinME box), but no joy. This is the only box we have that has WinXP on it and it is crippled. From what it said on the site for BartPE, I was hoping it would permit me to make the CD on our WinME box:

4. Now PE Builder will ask to search for windows installation files.

If you don't have your windows XP setup/installation files on your

system you must insert the original Microsoft Windows XP

installation/setup CD at this point.

BartPE found that WinME was installed on that box and it died there. If you have any ideas about how I can make the BartPE CD, on a non WInME box, they will be much appreciated! TIA, Lanny