I am trying to to reformat my desktop's primary (windows 98) and secondary (Fedora Core 2) harddrives but unable to remove linux. Intent is to install XP on primary drive and use the secondary drive as a external drive with my laptop.

If I remove the primary hard-drive from the system, I cannot boot off the linux drive. I tried booting with linux rescue cd and windows XP installation disc.... both times I get a blank screen saying "Grub disk error". I did plenty of Google search and everyone suggests going into command prompt and doing fdisk but I cannot get that far either (unless I'm looking into the wrong place in BIOS). I tried to use a boot-disk from www.ultimatebootcd.com but linux won't read it either.

Since the secondary harddrive (with FC2)won't load without the the primary drive i.e. Windows 98, I am afraid to reformat the primary drive too. To be honest, I am a linux amateur and pretty clueless at this point. I tried everything to my knowledge and failed. Any help will be much appreciated. Thanks.

The grub bootloader has two parts. One part is on the Master Boot Record of your primary harddrive. The other part of grub is in /boot/grub/menu.lst in the Fedora system. So as you now have grub set up both hard drives need to be present to successfully boot using grub.

When you move the secondary hard drive to your laptop do you intend to boot Fedora on your laptop? If so, then you will need to install a MBR with grub on the laptop primary hard drive and to make changes to /etc/fstab and /boot/grub/menu.lst on the Fedora system. You can do all of that by moving the hard drive to your laptop and then booting a liveCD on your laptop to make the necessary changes to Fedora and the MBR on the laptop primary hard drive.

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Steve Stites

Update:

I managed to boot through UBCD (Ultimate Boot CD) and used Killdisk program to wipe out both the drives. Now secondary drive (prior with Fedora) will get booted through Windows XP installation disk. However, the drive which had Windows 98 before will not boot at all (with anything!). I have tried boot disc, windows install disc... everything. The error is "Boot failure: System stalled".

Now that both the drives are blank, why should I be able to install whatever OS on them?? I am doing installation separately so both hdd's can be used as primary drives on different machines. ANy clues from here on?

Mr Ocean
can we know, wat is the boot priority on the BIOS settings, when u r using bootable Windows XP installation CD.If not, change the boot priority to cdrom pls
rgds
bil
Registered Linux user : 467324

Boot priority was cdrom.

Anyways, I looked into the BIOS setting and realized that the system is not even recognizing one of my drives!!! Now that both of them are to be used individually, I am doing installation on them separately and one of them is done.

But system refuses to recognize the other drive in BIOS. I am not sure how/ why would it do that??

Issue resolved, thanks for helping folks.