I had to reinstall a computer with XP. It would boot off the cd ok, but then after the “Setup is inspecting your computer’s hardware configuration” message came up, it wouldn’t do anything. It was just a blank screen. I ran memtest to check the memory and it all came up clean. I did notice that the light for hard drive activity would be constantly lit when the screen was blank. However, I had no problem at all in installing linux on this computer. So, I used a live cd of Damn Small Linux (DSL) to boot. Then I ran the following command:
# sudo fdisk /dev/hda The number of cylinders for this disk is set to 9729. There is nothing wrong with that, but this is larger than 1024, and could in certain setups cause problems with: 1) software that runs at boot time (e.g., old versions of LILO) 2) booting and partitioning software from other OSs (e.g., DOS FDISK, OS/2 FDISK) Command (m for help): o Building a new DOS disklabel. Changes will remain in memory only, until you decide to write them. After that, of course, the previous content won't be recoverable. Command (m for help): w
After this, the windows installation worked fine.