First off Greetings to All,
For my first post I plan to intrigue you with a problem I will inevitably be facing a short time from now. A friend of mine allowed me to install Redhat 9. on her pc (a dell 2.4 p-4 with 256 ddr 40 gig hd ,Default OS is running XP-home.) in a seperate partition of aprox 5 gigs. However I'm returning home in less than a month and I'd like to be able to return her pc to the same state it was before my arrival. I've ran dual boot machines before normally I would just reformat the drive but in this case I'd like to keep the windows partition intact. Its been a while but i've done this before however the only problem I've encountered is not beening able to remove the dualboot screen prompt at startup even though the other OS is completly removed. Also Since linux will be completly removed I'll have to use a third party app like partition magic since I dont believe the partitoning tool present on the windows XP disc will reconise linux "Or for another matter if its even included on her Dell Startup disc, like the one XP pro has." Sorry to be so long winded but if anyone has any suggestions on how to remove the dual boot prompt at startup or can recomend a good partitioning tool that reconises both OS linux and windows partitions, I would very much apreciate it... Thankyou
-PraxZeus

I believe if you get your hands on a Windows 98 boot disk, use this disk then type at the dos prompt fdisk MBR this will get rid of grub. Then when your in Windows XP go to Control Panel --> Administration Tools --> Computer Management go down to Disk Management, this will allow you to see the Linux partitions and just re-partition and re-format to NTFS or FAT32, your friend will just have a D: drive added on. I don't believe you can resize the XP partition unless you do use Partition Magic.

Thankyou very much for replying so quickly. I had origionally planed to install my own HD I had brought with me and just swap the drives as nessary or even run mine as a slave but the very attempt sent her into such a panic I was in fear for my life and promptly ceased my actions after failing to convince her it was a relatively easy task to perform. However she was kind enough to allow me to create a seperate partition (5 gigs aprox) to install RedHat ...all my apps ect.. I thought I thought of everything ... -"Famous Last Words". I visited dells website download the nessary drivers even found some updates she never knew were availible, I even updated Windows and showed her that the defrag tool located in system tools was her friend. What I didn't consider was when it comes time to leave since my vacation is almost up removing redhat from the drive. I have partition magic 7.0 with me and re alocatting the drive space back shouldn't be a problem with that my main concern was having the dualboot option poping up on start-up after removing linux, cause in the past my only solution to that was to f-disk the whole drive eventualy. I don't have a 98 start up disk at hand but Im sure I can download one somewhere. I will give your idea a try when the time comes and let everyone know how it went when iI return home. Other than that I was just inquiring if anyone recommend a good partitioning tool they perfer over partition magic for one reason or another. Thanx again for your reply
- PraxZeus

Not to dispute you, Jay, but I've always typed fdisk /mbr

Perhaps it works the way you posted also. Maybe PraxZeus will let us know.

You can download a boot disk from http://www.bootdisk.com/bootdisk.htm

Yes - its

fdisk/mbr

It's been so long since I've had to trouble shoot Windows problems since I am 100% Linux

# How do I uninstall Linux completely and keep/use Windows only?
How to Remove Linux and Install Windows 2000
How to Remove Linux and Install Windows XP
You can remove lilo from the mbr with
/sbin/lilo -u
You can remove grub or lilo from the mbr by booting with a Windows 98 boot floppy (at the prompt, type fdisk /mbr), or by using the Windows XP Recovery Console or the Windows 2000 Recovery Console