Installing Windows XP - The Smugenning

theSquid

So I'm a Linux guy who has made some space to install Windows XP for the sole purpose of playing the Spore Creature Creator. Windows XP won't install though, and my elitist Linux smugness is becoming a bit difficult to bear. :P

I make myself a NTFS partition using GParted, run the Windows installer, and try to install Windows on it.
Installer says this is a non-Windows compatible partition.
Do same thing with GParted, except make it FAT32.
Installer says the same thing.
Go to the recovery console on the the Windows XP installer CD, run DISKPART, create a New [Raw] Partition, exit, and then run format c: . I check DISKPART again and see that it apparently has made an NTFS partition, Windows style.
But it still won't install onto the drive. It's still a non-Windows compatible partition.

Any ideas?

DrFrylock

Is the partition a primary or extended partition? Also, XP's installer allows you to make the install partition during the install process. Why don't you just leave some empty/unpartitioned space on your drive, start the installation, and then when it gets to the point where it wants to partition, just tell it to create a new partition in the unused space?

theSquid

It's primary and actually doesn't allow me to press Enter on a unallocated portion of the disk. I'm starting to think my XP disc has shit itself.

Would running FIXMBR/FIXBOOT do anything?

DrFrylock

Yeah, those might work. I'm assuming you're using something like grub to boot right now - I'm not sure whether these will affect your ability to boot your Linux installation. They might screw it up until you fix it - actually, installing Windows fully might do that anyway. What's the exact error message you're getting?

theSquid

Yeah, XP always overwrites GRUB. It's okay though, since I'm planning a fresh install of Ubuntu anyway.

The exact message is:

To install Windows XP on the partition you selected,
Setup must write some startup files to the following disk:

305243MB Disk 0 at Id 0 on bus 0 on atapi [MBR]

However, this disk does not contain a Windows XP-compatible partition.

To continue installing Windows XP, return to the partition selection...

Now that I look at it, this has nothing to do with said partition. The hard drive I'm using is only 200GB. It's referring to one of the SATA ones.

This shouldn't be touching those drives, though. I think I might actually try buggering around the BIOS to change the first preferred drive to the 200GB one that XP is going on.

DrFrylock

Okay, see this is semi-important new information here.

As I understand it now, you have multiple hard drives. At least one is like a 300GB disk and another is a 200GB disk. You're creating partitions on the 200GB disk, and it's telling you you don't have any windows-compatible partitions on the 300GB disk (which is technically correct, since you don't).

This sounds an awfully lot more like a "Windows isn't recognizing my other hard drive" problem and less like a "Windows can't read my partitions correctly" problem. What drives do you have in your machine, how are they partitioned, and what controllers are they connected to?

theSquid

Well changing the priorities of the hard drives, so that the Windows drive was first certainly worked.

And yes, I have an IDE 200GB drive, and two SATA 300GB drives.
The two SATA 300GB drives are all Linux - ext3 and swap pretty much all the way, I think.
The 200GB has 2 NTFS drives now - 1 30GB for Windows, the rest for games and data.