[FIXED]: remove linux, and then install Windows XP

[Zhao Peng]

Hi,

It turned out the culprit of my booting problem is nothing but a 
non-functional Windows XP installer CD, which is suspected by some kind 
souls here.

With a working XP CD, no problem whatsoever in terms of booting into XP 
installation mode.

Before I found out XP CD is what to be blamed, I did both of following:

First, "dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda bs=512 count=1" when booted into 
Fedora rescue mode.

After this, the system didn't show "missing operating system" message 
whenever the machine was restarted.

Then, I did "fdisk /mbr" when booted from floppy.

But after this, the system did show "missing operating system" whenever 
the machine was restarted.

Isn't is true that ""fdisk /mbr" and "dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda bs=512 
count=1" are supposed to achieve same purpose?

If that's the case, why did they seem to have different consequence in 
terms of the message generated?

So now I'm back to the same old Windows. Next step I plan to install 
Fedora or Ubuntu, depending on which can enable me to use USB device. (I 
know they both are supposed to be able to automatically support USB device)

One more observation:

Now whenever the system boots up, there is always 2 lines of message:

unknown flash type
boot from CD:

What does  "unknown flash type" refer to?

Thank you for all your helpful solutions.

Zhao