I had installed Fedora to play around with it and see how it worked. I was fairly happy with it, but want to go back to windows on my primary pc. Problem is no matter what I cannot get windows to boot after a clean install. It appears that Fedora totally fucked my partition table and even potentially my MBR.

Does anyone have a solution for this or am I expected to scrap my hard drive and start over. In my Honest opinion this is totally friggin ridiculous. What kind of crappy OS will not let you remove it?

Ok what you have to do is this.

Try to get a WinXP (or the win you want) that boots, not upgrade
Enter on the fix options and rewrite the MBR (this is done in DOS)
And finally reboot your PC but leave the disk inside
Now install a new Windows so you canm delete the ext2/3 swap partitions
With a bit of luck you're done

already tried all of this, any real solutions? I have tried all of the obvious.....

what happen when you do what I said

Wasabi - it may have been useful to us if you had let us know what you had tried before.

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...dora+duel+boot
http://lwn.net/Articles/86835/

Which I found by searching LQ.

From what I see in your post, clearing up the mbr would take care of matters. Get a windows boot disk(Floppy) and give the command
fdisk /mbr

This will erase the mbr and you can boot into slavery. You also need to keep your language in check.

how about I tell you what you can keep in check.......

I will try with the boot disks, but I have already run fdisk /mbr, as well as fixmbr in the recovery console on the XP install disk.

Basically this totally sucks. I think my language was appropriate for the situation, at least you don't have to be around me in person.

Easy on the attitude pal. Such talk will get you nowhere. Everyone here is simply trying to help you.

If I have offended you, I am sorry. Hope you find a solution soon.

there really is no attitude

I think other people who are thinking about installing should know these things before they go and screw up their own pc's. This is just unacceptable for me.

The first step would be to know if your Windows installation still exists or not. Please let us know how how your partitions are setup. Here's my own partition setup:

[root@phil cedega-4-0]# fdisk /dev/hda

The number of cylinders for this disk is set to 3738.
There is nothing wrong with that, but this is larger than 1024,
and could in certain setups cause problems with:
1) software that runs at boot time (e.g., old versions of LILO)
2) booting and partitioning software from other OSs
(e.g., DOS FDISK, OS/2 FDISK)

Command (m for help): p

Disk /dev/hda: 30.7 GB, 30750031872 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 3738 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/hda1 * 1 765 6144831 b W95 FAT32
/dev/hda2 766 3738 23880622+ f W95 Ext'd (LBA)
/dev/hda5 766 3616 22892625 83 Linux
/dev/hda6 3616 3738 987934+ 82 Linux swap

Command (m for help): q

Then, try to mount Windows partition and see if it is empty or not:

mkdir /tmp/win
mount -t vfat /dev/hdaN /tmp/win
ls /tmp/win

If you can see your stuff, then you have a boot loader issue. Do the fdisk /mbr thing or fix your grub config to boot windows (/etc/grub.conf). My grub.conf is as follows:

default=0
timeout=10
splashimage=(hd0,4)/boot/grub/splash.xpm.gz
title Fedora Core (2.6.7)
root (hd0,4)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.7 ro root=/dev/hda5
initrd /boot/initrd-2.6.7.img
title DOS
rootnoverify (hd0,0)
chainloader +1

The drive is empty. It has nothing on it, I even reset the MBR using the XP install disk. After the install completes copying files and reboots to begin setup, I get the error, operating system not found. I feel that there must be some partition there that is still looking for my bootable fedora partition which is no longer there. Maybe I need to use some app like Disk Nuke or something.

windows still has problems identifying and removing a linux partition. I use swis knife if i have to plug a hard disk thats been formatted in lunix into a windows pc.

http://www.tucows.com/preview/293662.html

it's a free download.

thankyou for your helpful reply, I will try this and post results. I think this could be very helpful for many people who are in my same situation.

well this at least is heading in the right direction.......

problem is I cannot boot into windows to use a tool like this!

any other ideas or potential apps that are bootable?

maybe the one you are using to surf?