Help With Uninstalling Suse 9.3 (I have reasons!!!!)

chiefreborn · 09-21-2005, 04:10 PM

Okay. I have a dual-boot system with WinXP and SuSE 9.3. I love SuSE, don't get me wrong, however, it is taking up too much space on my 60GB HDD which has WinXP on it. I need an easy way to uninstall it that does NOT include the Windows XP disk, I lost that along with my laptop recovery CD's...I had to order new recovery CD's from eMachines for $40.

Anyways, I need a way to clean the MBR of GRUB and return it to its original state (with only the Windows bootloader installed) without altering my XP partition. (Yet...) As soon as I can successfully boot into XP again, I will simply remove the ext2 partition with PartitionMagic, but I am going to leave the swap space on there because I am a heavy Live CD user. If this goes wrong, I need a backup of the MBR. Is there any way to do what I have described? I have searched the forums thoroughly and could not find anything close enough to follow.

chiefreborn

UPDATE: Or maybe I could use my neighbor's CD to do it...is there any chance this will replace anything on my system that is already there? I need to be ABSOLUTELY SURE because it is a Service Pack 1 CD and I just want to make sure that it WILL NOT remove my startup entries or add more that I don't need. Plus, I think I need to move my XP partition it starts before and extends beyond both the 2GB boot code boundary, and the 1024 cylinder boundary. What on Earth should I do?! I feel overwhelmed!

kees-jan · 09-22-2005, 02:52 AM

Let's see...
Borrowing your neighbours CD should work

You should be able to restore the boot record to the original state using a recovery CD and typing either "fixmbr" or "fdisk /mbr". I'm not sure which.

To backup your boot record, you could use a Linux live CD, and type something like

Code:

dd if=/dev/hda of=/your/preferred/backup/location bs=512 count=1

To restore your boot record, use the same live CD, typing

Code:

dd if=/your/preferred/backup/location of=/dev/hda bs=512 count=1

Disclaimer: All of this is of the top of my head, without (re)reading any documentation. You'd better check with a second source before trying any of this.

Good Luck,

Kees-Jan

chiefreborn · 09-22-2005, 05:00 AM

Thanks, I'll back it up soon and try it out. If you don't get a reply from me for a while...you'll know what happened.

chiefreborn · 09-23-2005, 04:57 AM

Sorry I still haven't had the chance to do what you suggested yet, I am backing up the hundreds of thousands of files on my laptop...

jhenager · 09-24-2005, 07:19 AM

one of them is boot.exe. It will make a copy of your boot sector in case something goes wrong.
Get it here. Dual booting Win/Linux
This will give you something to fall back on.
The other utility that you can use to 'uninstall' is aefdisk. It removes partitions. Since your XP and Linux partitions are separate, you just delete the Linux partition, edit your boot loader (or use fixboot or fixmbr from your command line in XP) and you are all set.

chiefreborn · 09-25-2005, 07:19 PM

Thanks for your help! It worked, and I don't have any problems.

Cody Krieger