Windows XP wouldn't install on 3rd Partition :(

[manuleka]

i'm currently running Fedora 10 on a single drive 640GB P43.2 GHz rig... now here's the partitions i created while installing Fedora a few months back
Western Digital 640GB

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Partition -- Size -- Lable/Mount
Partition1-- 20GB -- /
Partition2 -- 440GB -- LVM
   LVM1 -- 200GB -- /home/user
   LVM2 -- 238GB -- /home/user/data
   LVM3 -- 2GB -- SWAP
Partition3 -- 140GB -- Unused Space

now i've tried 3 times to install Windows into the Partition3 and then reinstall/fix Grub after but every single time i tried i get an error reporting:

There has been an error with installation blah blah.... so i have to quit the installation, what i find weird is that although i select the unused space i keep getting partition 2 as the selected partition to be formated with NTFS...

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-: Partition 2 (Windows XP Fault Tolera(450000MB(450000MB Free)

Why is this? I left the unused 140GB space because i wanted to install WIndows later (4 gaming purposes)

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bash-3.2$ sudo fdisk -l
[sudo] password for manu:

Disk /dev/sda: 640.1 GB, 640135028736 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 77825 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x00024aa9

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sda1               1        2550    20482843+  83  Linux
/dev/sda2   *        2551       59917   460800427+  8e  Linux LVM
/dev/sda3           59918       77824   143837977+   7  HPFS/NTFS

/dev/sda3 was unused space before i tried to install Windows - which for some reason became NTFS (although formating only started and stopped in a few seconds)

by the way it is a SATA HDD

anyone come across this before or can help me out? cheers

[Ricky]

Use Qparted live cd and format that space using NTFS and then try winxp installation.

But I think windows XP want to have to boot partition also readable to it but here your boot partition is Linux hence it is unable to install. Reason is that it want to install its boot loader in boot partition.

If we can instruct XP to not to bother about boot loader then can install or simply make a partition which is boot partition and format it using ntfs or fat32 so that xp can read it or add a temporary drive with ntfs / fat32 as main partition and then install xp, later remove it and then use grub to boot XP.