hi everyone!

i have uninstalled grub from mbr (via xp´s recovery console), and now i can´t format my second harddrive (the one which i had linux mandrake on).

i did see the warning of course, in windows xp recovery console - that overwriting the "non-standard" functioning mbr might lead to accessproblems, but i chose to ignore that...

my problem is that i want to format my second drive into ntfs-file system, and now i wonder: do i have to reinstall grub in order to do that - to make it accessible from xp, and then format it before i remove grub? or is there any other way around this? thanx for help

how are you trying to format the drive? you do not need to reinstall grub. that would just cause more headaches! if all else fails just use fdisk to delete the partitions on your second drive and make new ones and format them.

i have very little experience on formatting harddrives (only through various linux installations), but to answer your question: i used the built-in tool in windows xp, logical disc manager. i began by removing all linux-partitions, and then i just created one big partition (hm, maybe too big?). after formatting the 74gb drive for a long time, up until 100%, i got a message that the formatting could not be completed.

can i use the recovery console to format, or fdisk (but that doesn´t work in xp, does it?)