Booting Hard Drive After Removing Linux
 

I removed Linux from my hard drive and when I start the computer, it says "GRUB." I also tried reinstalling Linux, but it does not boot off the Linux disc. The hard drive's capacity is 10 GB, but in Windows it shows up as a little over 500 MB. Is there a problem with this hard drive caused after the removal of Linux?

When an operating system is installed on a hard drive, several sectors at the begining of the drive are written with special information - the MBR (master boot record, where grub usually lives) and the partition table. If the Linux system uses LVM/LVM2 (Logical Volume Management) or software RAID, there is some additional data.

Removing the data on the drive does not change these sectors. Windows can have difficulty interpreting the data in a Linux partition table.

To remove the data, boot a linux rescue disk and type:

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hdx bs=512 count=16

(where '/dev/hdx' is the drive to be completely wiped out)

Windows will now see this as an uninitialzed drive.

The computer does not boot anything with this hard drive attached, so it would not boot a Linux rescue disc.

It sounds like you need to change the boot order in the BIOS.

When you removed linux the menu.lst file was deleted but not grub from the Master Boot Record (MBR). Boot the Windows XP or W2K install CD and select recovery mode, then run fixmbr.

Deleting a linux partition should not of changed anything with windows (except for restore (MBR). However, not know exactly what you did I can not say either way.