Uninstalling linux...

Raam

Hi there
I have this, eh, "friend" who had XP and Redhat on his machine. My "friend" last night decided that since he never uses linux he may as well delete it. So, he booted up XP, ran partition magic and removed the linux and swap partitions and used this free space to resize a previously existing FAT32 partition (there is no free space to add any more partitions of any kind). However, when the PC boots, it now goes in to some GRUB shell, and my "friend" has no idea what to do there.
He then tried booting from the redhat install disk and running 'linux rescue' and see what he can do there, and he noticed that there is an 'mformat' command. Can he use this to format the MBR? If so, what is the exact command? He tried mformat -B but no joy . Can anyone help?

thanks

my "friend"

tomk

Any chance your "friend" created an XP boot disk? If so, this should have fdisk on it. Boot from it, and enter

fdisk /mbr

and your friend should be fine.

UPDATE:

OK, I don't use XP. It seems there is a better way here:

Under Windows XP, you can restore the original MBR (thus uninstalling Lilo) as follows:
Boot from the Windows XP CD, press the key "R" in the setup in order to start the restoration console. Select your Windows XP installation from the list, and enter the administrator password. Enter the command "FIXMBR" at the input prompt and confirm the next question with "y". Finally, use "exit" to restore the computer.

This refers to lilo, but will work just as well with GRUB.

Raam

Hi TomK,
that is what my "friend" tried the last time he did this, but since he doesn't have a floppy drive in his new PC he thought he might try something else first. I will tell him to get a floppy drive!

thanks

my "friend"

tomk

Just updated my original post, King. You can boot from the CD.

niallb

Your best bet is possibly to boot from grub...
The reason it's dropping you to a prompt
is probably because you deleted its config files
when you formatted the partition.
Try typing the config in manually at the prompt!

This should be close to the stanza that booted XP for you.

Pull up a webpage about grub to find out why this (should!) work.
LinuxGazette had a good article if they're still around.


grub> rootnoverify (hd0,0)
grub> makeactive
grub> chainloader +1
grub> boot


Good luck,
NiallB

dahamsta

If FIXMBR doesn't work (it probably won't), follow the same steps to get to the recovery console and run FIXBOOT.

(Tip of the Day: If you fiddle about with OS's a lot, install the Recovery Console on your hard drive (5MB). No more searching for the effing CD!)

adam

Typedef

You're 'friend' should really catch himself on and learn to use a real OS.

Raam

he is learning, hence the questions!