I have a dual-boot system with XP pro and Fedora Core 3 and I am having troubles trying to uninstall FC3. I can't find a simple way to get grub off my system without wreaking my HD.

I use to have SUSE 9.1 installed and I was told to use XP's recovery console to remove the boot loader using fixmbr. That detroyed my partition table and I needed to reformat the whole drive, BIG pain in the @$$. I really don't want to try that again because Iam sure it'll do the same thing. I tried just removing the FC3 partition but that made GRUB crash and it wouldn't boot at all. I ended up reinstalling FC3 and GRUB just to get back into WinXP.

Is there any way to remove GRUB without using fixmbr? Or could I possibly install a different bootloader over GRUB that wouldnt crash when I remove the linux partition like GRUB does?

Partitions are as such:

Primary [ (19.5GB NTFS - WinXP) ]
Logical [ (5GB EXT3 - Fedora) (0.5GB LinuxSwap) (12GB NTFS - Storage) ]

Kinda messy, I know... thats what I get for having an un-upgradeable Laptop.

In the end I would like to turn the Fedora and Swap partitions into one FAT32 partition so I can dual-boot XP with 98 (dont ask, long story).

Thanks for any help. If nothing works, hopefully in the next little while I can get some off site HD space so I can back up everything and completely re-format/re-install.

Sorry for the long post...

KrankyJoe,

You can try booting off the Windows XP cd, and going in to the recovery console. When you get to the command prompt try typing 'fixboot c:' or 'fix boot c:'(assuming the boot loader is on C) And that should remove GRUB. If it doesnt help, im afraid all you can do is reformat, or put FC3 back on as you said before. When I needed to uninstall FC3/GRUB I did 'fixmbr' and it fixed it fine, also 'fixboot c:' worked for me when I was trying to uninstall GRUB from one of my machines.

Anyway, good luck.

IceDark

Thanks, I'll try that, hopefully I'll be able to get a couple 10GB HD's from school tomorrow that I can use to backup everything first. If it doesnt work Ill just reformat.

Thanks for your input.