i have a laptop with Red Hat installed on it. the floppy bay is broken. im looking for a way to fdisk, format, or debug this system without floppy support. i tried booting from a bootable windows xp cdrom at start up. but it just loads redhat normally everytime. and the correct boot order in bios is set. i just need a way to get linux off, and xp on, without floppy support. someone suggested running windows from inside linux. but im having trouble mounting my cdrom. i also have a ext. usb floppy drive.. but its of no help to me because bios doesnt detect usb.. anyone have a suggestion?

If you have trouble booting the XP install disk and mounting the cdrom then it looks like the CDrom drive is at fault. Can you mount any other data disk?

So your laptop wont boot of the WinXP CD?
Have you tried the CD on another computer to see if it works?

The cdrom worked when i had XP Pro on prior to the linux installation. And ive tried multiple Windows cds such as 2000 Pro, 98 SE, and XP Home/Pro. im very confused.

If you put another CD in the computer to boot from it, does it boot from the CD? If not, the computer may not be trying to boot from CD at all because the hard drive is bootable. Enter the BIOS setup program for your laptop and change the boot device priority - make sure the laptop is seeking the optical drive before it seeks the hard drive.

If you really want to wipe out your hard drive you can log in as root and do this:

This will write out 1000 512kb blocks from the starting cylinder on your HDD, which should wipe out the MBR plus the first few hundred blocks of your first partition. ONLY do this if you are absolutely, positively, 110% sure you want to remove Linux from your laptop.

Note: I am assuming that your hard drive is enumerated as /dev/hda.

Is this a Dell Laptop? I fixed one about a year ago that had similar characteristics. The owner had tried to upgrade to xp from me, and lost cdrom support. I took an old cdrom from a compaq and put it in the dell cartrage, plugged it in and the bios recognized it. After installing xp I reinstalled the cdrom that came with the machine and it worked. The "fixmbr" command under Xp and 2000 sucessfully clear the boot sector of linux (li and then goes no further) there is a second utility there think it is "fixboot" that you may invoke. It would be wiser to do the dd=if /dev/zero of=/dev/hda bs=512 count=1 which you may invoke from the Knoppix cdrom, after changing the read write status of hda to writable.
Over the years I have tried various dual Boot schemes. Usually one or the other of the operating systems required a reload and then getting boot to work from lilo or grub was sometimes a problem. The best solution is to use a second hard drive for your linux distro. Remove the windows hard drive and strap the linux hard drive as master. Install Linux. Strap the linux hard drive as slave and reinstall your window hard drive, strapped as master. Use your bios "boot first" selection to select your os or on newer computers your boot select menu will work. On laptops I use Knoppix 4.0 loaded on a usb stick. Sometimes I have to boot from the cdrom typing in "knoppix fromhd=/dev/sda1" which frees up the cdrom for music or movies...

A question: Some laptops don't have a CD-ROM drive and a floppy drive at the same time, but they can be exchanged one against the other (they share the same "slot"). If this is your case, it may be, that not the floppy drive was broken, but some controller inside your computer and that the CD-ROM drive won't work anymore because of this. Still you could try to do a network install, if your computer can boot from a network (pxe-boot, ...).