ver very weird thing in xp

[ambrosia]

Hi,
I am facing very weird kind of problem. I have a IBM thinkpad R52 laptop. It's configuration is pantium M 1.73GHz, 512 MB RAM, 40 GB hard disk.
I have installed windows xp and fedora core 4 linux. My problem is that I want to reinstall windows xp but my laptop would not boot with xp cd. It is booting with linux cd. I have checked my xp cd and is working fine. When I try to boot from xp cd, it shows the message "checking your hardware configuration" and then screen becomes blank and cd rom goes down.
My another problem is that in the same laptop xp is running very slow.
I deleted it's partition table and then i was able to boot with xp cd. I reinstalled xp 2 times with this procedure. xp worked fine for few days and it again became slow after every install. I am not facing any such problem with linux.
any help and suggestions are appreciated.
thanx in advance.

Dheeraj

[linux]

It actually might be Linux that is acting up on your laptop. It might be making your laptop not read the CD correctly. Why did you have to reinstall XP? Did your laptop come with a restore disk that you can use instead?

And about how the laptop is acting slowly, it may be a virus or spyware. Install and run an Ad-Aware check.

Hope this helps a bit. It all else fails, try Google.

-- Alex

[ambrosia]

It actually might be Linux that is acting up on your laptop. It might be making your laptop not read the CD correctly. Why did you have to reinstall XP? Did your laptop come with a restore disk that you can use instead?

And about how the laptop is acting slowly, it may be a virus or spyware. Install and run an Ad-Aware check.

Hope this helps a bit. It all else fails, try Google.

-- Alex

hi alex,
thanx for reply. I did following things to solve the problem :
1) defragmented the hard drives.
2) ran the antivirus scan but no virus found
3) installed spyware and checked system with spyware
but these things did not help, then I inserted xp cd and updated xp( probably it replaces all the system files) and heyyyy it worked and my lappy got back it's nerves. I think some system file had got corrupted but I am not able to figure out how same thing is happening again and again.
btw lappy still does not boot with xp cd. It may be because of linux but I have other dual boot systems also around me and they don't have this problem and they easily boot with xp cd.

--Dheeraj

[Davelray]

Linux can have some undesired after effects on hardware. I've even seen a monitor go pop and start smoking after having misconfigured the X server. My suggestion, back up your linux partition then perform a secure erase of the hard drive just to make sure there are no viruses left behind, then install Windows XP clean. Install XP before you reinstall linux and see if Windows behaves properly. If Windows behaves properly you should be fine. If it goes back to the same activity after reinstalling FC4, I would have to start investigation what in FC4 could be causing an issue. For that level of troubleshooting I recommend the linux forum. I am a mere novice when it comes to Linux.

[ambrosia]

hi david,
thanx for ur reply. I have done the things suggested by you. I reformatted my whole hard disk and reinstalled both the os's but I got the same problem again. BTW I have worked on many machines with bothe the operating systems on them and they work just very well. Hence I suppose problem is not caused by linux.
And the boot problem that I have described earlier is on my thinkpad lappy only. I have not seen that on any other machine so I think it has something with thinkpad itself.
My lappy has been working fine this time after updating the xp :)
Let's see how many days it goes.