another question about dual booting
 

I am planning on dual booting with linux and windows xp, if i decide i want rid of linux after installing it how do i uninstall it? just format the hard drive its installed on? and will this make windows xp load up automatically again?

Thanks

yeah...
you can use fdisk..
then you can clean the partition that you installed Linux with format or other tools...
remember that you need to change the filesystem to use Linux

regards

slackie

You will have to use the repair console and run fixmbr or use the diskpart program. fdisk will not work for XP.

Google for: NT Lilo Boot Howto.

If you use the NT Loader that XP uses to boot into lilo, then if you decide to get rid of linux later, you will only have to delete a line that you added to c:\boot.ini.

Here are abbreviated instructions:
During setup, write the lilo bootstrap loader to your root partition. If linux is on another disk, then you sellect the mbr of the linux disk.
If you can enter a console screen just after this point, <ctrl><alt><F2> for some distros, then you can copy the boot-strap sector to a file on floppy disk. Suppose that you installed lilo to /dev/hda5.
First mount the floppy somewhere: mount -t vfat /dev/fd0 /mnt/floppy
Then copy the sector to a file: dd if=/dev/hda5 of=/mnt/floppy/linux.lnx bs=1 count=256
Unmount the floppy: umount /mnt/floppy
Boot into XP.
Change the attributes of c:\boot.ini: attrib -s -r -h c:\boot.ini
Add the line c:\linux.lnx="Linux 9.2" to the end of boot.ini
Change the attributes back: attrib +s +r +h c:\boot.ini

Now you are ready to finish the linux setup and boot into either XP or Linux. Good Luck!

Note: The name of the boot sector file is arbitrary. So is the description "Linux 9.2". Replace hda5 with the partition that you installed linux on.

just to clarify the misunderstanding...
you can make a test installing Linux in a second hard drive...
if you have already a XP installed, you don't need to do anything with your XP..
install Linux, using fdisk for partition definition, in your second HD ...
make a boot disk, for sure always the most safe options for newbie that is not sure if will keep Linux..
if you take a decision to eliminate the Linux partition you just need to run fdisk again for the filesystem that you want...
that is what I mean..

regards

slackie