hi all , i have a very important question about the grub boot loader .. where does it copy it self ? coz i formated the partition that has linux on it , but when i restarted the computer i couldn't access the part that has windows .. grup opens , and it doesn't do anything .. freezez .. actually i did fdisk too !! , and deleted all the partition that were to linux ( the swap ..etc ) and made the whole disk defined as DOS partitions , and reinstalled windows , but when ever i restart the computer , grup comes up , and i don't know what to do ,, please help me .. i need to use the computer soooo much ..

Grub puts the loader manager in the MBR, but reinstalling windows should have override the MBR.
Boot the PC with a win security diskette, go to DOS and type fdisk /mbr
This should solve the problem and let you boot windows.

Hope it helps

thank you very much for this super fast answer .. i'll try it now , and see what happens

amazing .. thaaaaanks man .. you are sooo pro

best regards

You're welcomed! We're here to help, you know....

actually i formated linux .. coz my laptop is pretty old
233 Mhz , 32 ram , 3 gb hard drive ..

if i want to install linux on it , what do you think the best version is ?

coz i installed red hat 9 , but it was quite disaster !! so slow ..

if you have a link to a good version , could you please post it here ..

by the way what is mbr ?

Mmmmmm, definetly, don't put Mandrake....(I hate it...) I have a RH9 and works pretty good with me, also because i have quite brand new PC (8 months old).
I think any "new" distro will be quite slow on that laptop anyways, so it's up to you.... I suggest you go to the main distro's website and choose from there. Most of the times is just a matter of likes and dislikes.

Easy to install and full of shit distro's: mandrake, redhat, suse
Hard to install and you only put what you really want: Debian, Gentoo
Never seen a Slackware, so i don't know where to put it

Hope it helps

well .. i don't need really fancy screens .. i just need it very simple .. i just need to use it to write and compile c and java programs .. and i wanna use it to learn linux .. ( for writing java and c , i really like kwrite editor .. )

did this narrow down what i'm looking for .. ?

you know what .. i'll post this in a seprate thread .. we get more opinions