Attempting to Uninstall Fedora 17 on a dual boot with Mint 13 LXDE
 

Salutations!

I have been Linux for a short period of time and have not had this problem yet. I have been using Mint 13, LXDE for quite awhile and wanted to try Fedora 17. I heard it is "cutting edge" and "the most user friendly" amongst other things. Well, I installed it as the Live CD option was just too slow on this laptop(Dell Latitude D630, Dual Core, 2g ram, 500g HDD) to get the appropriate experience. I've used it for a few months, and I'm not a fan.

I'd like to remove it but I can't seem to find the partition it's on. GParted doesn't show the partition it where it resides and I can't access it from Nautilus on Mint. I know it's there because I only have 350 gigs on the HDD for Mint 13 and can obviously boot it from Grub.

I'd like to avoid re-installing everything, if possible, but I've read other threads that say you don't remove an OS, just replace with another. I know that's really bullocks, so if there's a kind soul to help, I'd really appreciate getting my other 150gig back ;)

Thanks in advance

Update:
Used PMagic on USB to access Fedora, but it is under dm-1? not sda 1 thru 6 and anything I tried to format or delete it gave me a variety of errors involving a wrapper and illegal something or other. If this is needed, I'll write it down and let everyone know.

What is the output of

?

NEW yes , so VERY new that some "newish" versions of programs do not build on it

"the most user friendly"
a very BIG no to that
you will have to hack software to get it to build and install to the VERY new software in 17

so it is by far NOT "user friendly"
( and i am a long time user of fedora )

from fedora or mint
run AS ROOT ( i use "su -" )
that is a lowercase "dash ell "
that will give you the partition layout

mint was on there first
so
fedora is going to be on the end
sd3,sd4,sd5,... something like that

??? odd ??? very odd
it should auto mount with read only permission
or
you might need to be root to read it ??? but not likely


when you installed fedora
did you use a SECOND boot partition for fedora and bootstrap it in the mint13 bootloader ??????
or
did you overwrite mints bootloader with fedora's ???

if the first
then just reformat in gparted the NON mint partitions

fedora "should" have auto used the SWAP that is used in mint and set that at install
the DEFAULT fedora install uses a LVM
so IF it is a FULL default ONLY install
fedora will only be on ONE LVM partition
and will have overwrote Mint's boot partition


you might need to reinstall mint's bootloader

This is what I got....
Disk /dev/sda: 160.0 GB, 160041885696 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 19457 cylinders, total 312581808 sectors
Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x0002152f

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sda1 * 2048 218433535 109215744 83 Linux
/dev/sda2 308408318 312580095 2085889 5 Extended
/dev/sda3 218433536 219457535 512000 83 Linux
/dev/sda4 219457536 308406271 44474368 8e Linux LVM
/dev/sda5 308408320 312580095 2085888 82 Linux swap / Solaris

Partition table entries are not in disk order

I now know that this is NOT a 500 G HDD as I originally thought....and realize the computer was not as much of a steal when I bought it...Oh well.

Now, per your comment, It looks like perhaps sda4 is fedora 17?

When I installed f17, I'm not sure what happened as far as the bootloader, but I can say that Grub never popped up before. When F17 was installed, Grub 2 beta 4 popped up on boot and Fedora17 was first. Then, a few weeks ago, it updated and now I have 3 F17 selections in Grub(1 for each kernel) and then Mint. Maybe it was overwritten when Grub was installed by F17?

from the output you DID replace the software on /boot( sda1) see the * in the line
when you installed fedora

and fedora IS on a LVM
you should be able to just reformat" /dev/sda4 " to ext3 using gparted live CD

then using the mint install dvd
reinstall grub

then add an entry in fstab to mount the "soon to be blank" sda4

Alrighty,

Used PMagic and reformatted the drive to ext3, then I rebooted back into Mint via installer disc. * I did try to resize the main drive to "absorb" the unallocated space prior to formatting, but that didn't work *

I couldn't figure out how to reinstall grub without reinstalling Mint as a whole, so I rebooted into Mint on the HDD. I used Package Manager to do a complete removal of Grub and associated config files. Then, I quickly reinstalled Grub right after. No problems there.

Upon reboot - voila - (insert magic sounds here) .....booted right into Mint, no problems, no grub menu with F17 as an option. Awesome.

Now, I just did a cursery look using the search for files tool, but couldn't find fstab. I'll look through some other sites, but if you could post what that might be(I'm assuming a sort of boot config file?), I'd appreciate it.

This tells about fstab
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fstab

Great read, Thank You!

I will try editing the file after work and keep you posted.

With fstab modified, the system is back to normal.
This was a great learning experience and really appreciate everyone's patience
Thanks All!