boot off the XP cd and during the blue screen part of install there are sections for partitioning and formatting. unless your system has some wierd config you should just need to make one big partition of type NTFS and install windows to it.

there is a page on MSDN.COM that has exactly how to do this
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/314458

I just put in the Windows cd in the drive and restarted the computer with it and it asked me to press any key too boot from the cd and I pressed one key on the keyboard and in a moment something like this flashed on the screen "Setup is inspecting your computer's hardware configuration" then the computer hangs for a long time nothing happens. Any idea?

I am going nuts, can't figure out what is wrong here. Is there any free partition software that can be installed on Fedora core 5 32 bit that I am using in order to get rid of Linux completely and install Windows XP ?

just leave it for a while
xp needs a driver floppy if you have sata

I have just managed to download a program called "qtParted" using the command "yum install qtparted" and restarted the pc and now I am deleting the only partition (primary) on which the Fedora core 5 32 bit is installed at the moment as the only os on the pc. Am I doing the right thing? How long does it generally take? Help please..

you arent listening.

you start xp install off the cd and you can do all this from there

look at this image: in this part of the install you just delete the linux partition and make a new one for XP

http://web.mit.edu/ist/products/winx...pairdeep01.gif

Hi,

Thanks for the help. I know about the image and have seen it before, but the problesm is I have already put in the Windows xp cd in the drive to install it and restarted the computer with it and it asked me to press any key to boot from the cd and I pressed one key on the keyboard and in a moment something like this flashed on the screen "Setup is inspecting your computer's hardware configuration" then the computer hanged for a long time and nothing happened at all that is why I searched on the net and came across something called "qtparted" so I installeded it using the yum command. The windows xp installation does not go any further from the message "Setup is inspecting your computer's hardware configuration" so unfortunately I can not get to the stage shown in the figure given by you. This is the whole story as of now. I appreciate your help.

you have to leave it for ages on the probing hardware bit if your machine has stuff which wasnt really around circa 2001 when xp was made (e.g raid, sata...) - on some cases this can be up to 30 minutes

Is the xp cd bad?
Does it work on another machine?