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ok i have an 1999 year old machine its got ATI 128 rage AGP grafix card and a pentium 3 CPU and a 12.7GB HD. ok enought of the stupid worthless hardware....my problem: the machine came with win98 or i think it was ME ok well my brother had it in his apartment at college and i had a brand new dell 2400 and he decided to take it insted and he would leave me with the old n' slow computer so he did. then when i put my hands on it i just backed up all his documents to CD's. then i got my XP pro OS and installed it(erasing the other OS) then i got bord of that so i formated the HD so then i installed the Red Hat Linux 9 that my kuzin recomended me so i did now i decided to install xp and have 2 OS'S in one machine. so i made the machine boot from the cdrom with XP disk in it. and it gave me an error that said "invalid boot diskette please inster valid boot diskette" now i tried it with ms-dos diskette and the command D:setup.exe and it said ".exe cannot be run in ms-dos" so i gave up on that. now i was wondering if any of you's kan give me advice on how to install xp on my machine.. al be back later

If you want to have xp and RedHat on the machine, I'd install xp first, and then boot with RedHat. Let it install a boot loader for you, then you'll be able to choose what to boot to.

If you're not able to boot at all with the xp disk right now, I'd try it with the RedHat disk, and wipe everything out. Then try again.

well thanks fo that info but i tried to reinstall redhat and wiped the entire HD but it still won't boot from XP disks. i even use Diagft32.exe from Dell which is a win95 Boot disk and i made two partitions one fo linux and the other for xp, then formated them and still no hope..i guess wat i will do is all remove the HD and al stick it in my Dell computer and all boot tha xp disk from there and install it on the HD..except do you think that xp can read the file system ext3 kuz thats wat linux is on i know fo sho that linux can read fat32 but i not sure xp will read ext3.

Not sure if it can. I'd google it. I wouldn't be surprised if xp refuses to read it.

The problem is that you're trying to start the setup.exe in DOS. Go into the BIOS and set the CDROM to boot first. You can enter the BIOS by holding the DEL key.

well my machine can't boot from cdrom so thats y i have some good for nothing windows xp setup disk(6) but don't work.... maybe a bios upgrade will help. but i dont know what brand or model of mother board i have..

Thats odd, you sure it's 1999 and not 1991?

Unless it's a really low-low end model from 99, maybe i just aint sold on not able to boot from CD first... change the order is what I mean, CDROM being first and then HD0, and so foruth.

I had this problem. 950mhz Duron puter.
I could boot to floppy and install 98 or anything else I wanted as long as I booted to floppy first, but I could not boot to a cd including xp or knoppix.
I tried everything. Changing the bios settings, reseting the bios, testing the bios to make sure that it was able to boot to cd, changing cd drives, ide cables, ram, reseating the cpu, changed the hd, put in an ide controller card, etc..

What I finally noticed that was if i dropped my xp disk in the cd drive after I had 98 installed on it, the xp disk would launch. From there I started to load xp telling it to wipe out the 98 install and reformat the drive to NTFS. In no time, I had a clean install of xp without being able to boot to cd.

I still don't know why it wouldn't boot to cd, but I think something is messed up on the mobo. Other than that, it runs fine.

Holy crap The Toad lives.

grinch2171 wrote:Holy crap The Toad lives.

I am just as, if not more, shocked that you.

I'm alive. In Waste most of the time. Nice to see you guys.

well i fix my issue a looong time a go last year...i found out that i had to mess with the BIOS a little..
and now it is WinXP pro and i recently reinstalled it. so i am all good now....

it has been a loooong to that i have been to this forum..