Get rid of XP

Pedroski · 05-25-2004, 09:58 AM

I use Mandrake and Fedora myself, but I have to have Win for the boys and their games. I installed XP, but they don't like it, want Millenium back, but Millenium can't write to the MBR.
I installed Mandrake over the Win harddrive, but apparently it didn't write to the MBR. I thought Lilo was installed there? The bios is set to give a warning on write attempt to MBR. It does that when trying to install Millenium, but then can't write to MBR. What has xp done to my harddrive?
How do I expunge it? I've tried fdisk cfdisk format Disk Druid. But something is set on the harddrive and won't budge!
I want my drive back. Is there a flag set somewhere??

Nis · 05-25-2004, 10:12 AM

Check your BIOS for a setting similar to "Virus Protection" or "MBR Protection". If you have this turned on then nothing will be able to write to the MBR. Turn it off and then try again.
Better yet, why not let the boys play native Linux games like Neverball or SuperTux? If they're Win-games that need to be played, have you tried Wine or WineX?

Bruce Hill · 05-25-2004, 10:13 AM

If you're wanting to wipe the hard drive clean and start over, then boot with the
Millenium CD to DOS and then format the drive. You could also get a disk utility from
your drive manufacturer and even zero fill the drive or do a low-level format. And
boot your box and hit Delete and go into the BIOS and disable the write to MBR
feature so that you can fix your drive; then, before you give it back to the boys,
you can enable that feature again.

Why ME? That's the absolute worst OS anybody ever put out. For games you'd
be much better off with W98SE.

jvdbossc · 05-25-2004, 10:15 AM

You will loose you're multiboot-functionality when you try to install windows me again.

(only windows me will boot)

Make sure you have a disk to boot youre linux distro!

have you tried fdisk /mbr (writes a new boot record)

LoungeLizard · 05-25-2004, 10:42 AM

He could write a line in the boot.ini file to dual boot back to linux using the windows boot loader

lamiczka · 05-25-2004, 10:44 AM

Try to boot up with Mandrake install CD and in the install (press F1) screen select "rescue". Then select "restore windows partition"

Worked fine for me and my stupid NT