i put a 20g hd as a slave on my desktop so i could install linux on my laptop. it worked fine and i now have a dual boot xp/redhat box with grub bootloader. now for the problem: taking the slave hd out. i tried just taking it out, but that was wrong, then i tried turning off the slave in the bios setup, no good. i'm thinking that i have to use 'fdisk /mbr' to re-do the mbr in windows when i take out the slave. the only problem is if i do this and it don't work, then i may not be able to start anything. does anyone know if i'm on the right track?

Okay... You are kind of on the right track. As far as I know (and have experienced) once you install linux and one of its "boot loaders" you can't easily just uninstall or remove your linux install and the boot loader that it installed. So yeah it gets really tricky to get back to just booting windows (or whatever OS you were running before you installed linux). There might be a really is fix with fdisk like you had mentioned but I don't know about that.

There is one simple solution to booting linux and not messing up your master boot record though. If the computer you have has a floppy drive you can just use a bootable floppy to boot linux and then when you don't want to boot linux (say you don't even have the slave drive in your computer) you just don't put the floppy disk in the drive. I specifically know that works with Fedora. Hope that helps =).

This also might help:

MS Knowledge Base on FDISK /MBR

GL!

that is the thing: first it's already done, 2d, no floppy. i have heard that lilo was really hard to remove, but the command i found somewhere on this forum is supposed to make windows re-install the last good mbr. thanx for the info.

I'd be interested in that command if you know it or have a link to it. =)

i can't find it now. i've been reading so many places and writing down what to do. then i go log in on redhat, try it, log back in here, etc. it's been a real nightmare, time to set the laptop up on the desk. i have a cd boot disc and if i could get the boot image on a flash drive, i'd be set for xp. you wouldn't know how to do that would ya?