I have a C and D drive and on the C drive i have windows xp and on the D drive I have mandrivia and I was wondering how to uninstall mandrivia completely without having to reformat the computer. So I can use my D drive for windows xp.

you don't have mandriva on a D drive, as linux doesn't recognise drive letters (wtf is C supposed to mean?). anyway... under dos, just delete the undesired partitions and recreate them as fat32 or ntfs and format it.

You have a C drive and D drive you know primary and secondary. Duh!! Well I have two drives my C drive has windows XP on it and D drive has mandrivia.

Like he said above, reformat your linux partition to ntfs/fat32 whatever you use. Also you'll want to get rid of lilo/grub. Boot your XP cd to a prompt and type fixmbr

From Windows XP right click on the my Computer icon. Choose "manage". In the window that opens up along the left side click on "disk managment". From here you can delete the "d" partition and create a new partition that windows can format as fat or NTFS. In order to remove GRUB or LILO from the system you will probably need to boot to the windows xp cd and get to a repair mode. The repair mode is a command promt and you can type in "fixmbr" to get the windows xp loader back into the mbr.

that's just wrong either way. I have no windows on my system, therefore there is not one shred of reference to a C or D drive. also, what if your primary master IDE drive has two partitions on it? where does D go then?

acid_kewpie: stop baiting the poor windows person - don't you know MS encourages this sort of ignorance. B'sides, you know as well as I do that he is using the drive letters to refer to seperate hard drives rather than partitions ... in fact, it sounds like the primary master is entirely the original XP install and when the second drive was plugged in, he "installed it" to windows so windows called the whole thing D: ... this will be making Mandrivia behave oddly as windows will keep overwriting bits.

Windows does not play well with the other children.

(This may even be why he wants to get rid of mandrivia and return to the blissful windows )

Computerguy2: Leaving aside why you would want to do something so insane as go back to windows ... Here's a translation of your request ...

You have two Hard Drives installed in your computer.
IDE1 master = hda contains windows
IDE1 slave = hdb contains Mandrivia

You would like to no longer have mandrivia.
You would like to make IDE1 slave completely available to windows.

Good.

Step 1: get rid of the linux bootloader. Use the Windows recovery and type fixmbr (which is to fix the master boot record. It won't actually do this, it's not broken, it will just write the windows bootloader in there.)

Step 2: use the standard windows method of installing a hard drive. If winodws already calls this drive D:, delete that drive. When you have the option to completely format the drive, do so. Bye-bye mandrivia.

And look how much you have learned already...

Good replies from the rest of you guys