What happened to my MBR?
 

I installed Mandrake 9.1 on the second partition (on the first one i have xp, and i have another xp on the third partition for backup). In the installation process i installed lilo on hda2! When i rebooted, the Linux boot menu showed, and when i choose windows, then comes the windows boot menu. Could somebody explain what happend to my MBR and what will happen if i delete Linux, 'course i have lots of problems with Mandrake and i'm thinking about installing Linux as a virtual machine and deleting the linux partition!

Lilo is installed on your MBR,

If you uninstall linux, the part of lilo that's in the MBR will still be there but you can remove it after...

I don't know about windows XP but if you have windows 98 or something I know all it takes is a boot disk and

fdisk /mbr or something like that.

Fixing MBR with WindozXP CD.

1)Using partition software such as Partition Magic®,delete the Linux partition and distributed the free space among your existing partitions.
2)Insert your WinXP CD in your CD-ROM and enable CD-Boot in your BIOS.
3)After CD loadup process finished, you will get the Setup menu.
4)Press R to enter the Recovery Console.
5)Choose the drive where you install your windows.
6)Insert your administrator password.
7)At the console, type fixmbr
8)Press Y for all questions.
9)Reboot the Zion..oopss the PC
10)And Walla!! your MasterBootRecord has come back to normal.

Hi Kavelj

In general - The MBR is just the boot sector on your 1st hard drive - it's simply a tiny area that the BIOS is preconfigured to have the option of checking for a bootloader - so your MBR is still there whether its got a Windows or Linux bootloader in it. - you said you installed both Linux and LILO on hda2 - if thats the case then LILO is not in your MBR - its in the boot sector of the 2nd partiton on your drive.

For this scenario where you've got Linux sandwiched between 2 XP partitions I'd use Powerquests Partition magic to delete HDA2

Anthrax has covered the rest.