Hello, I have a Simple Question. I had a Microsoft XP system and was sick of it, So I have linspire 4.5 now, and it is functioning properly. I recently have purchased an Xbox and want to reinstal windows back onto my laptop and use linspire on my desktop. When I put the windows installer disk into the drive it jsut stops at detecting hardware. I'm thinking it's windows xp not reading a reiserfs HD, but this laptop was formerly NTFS, how would I delete linux off my computer completely, In microsoft I used the dos prompt format C:. where do i format a linux OS??

I do understand that this pertains to microsoft a little and some my give me stuff for that but calling microsoft will lead me into a world of hell. So if any of you can please from the bottom of your penguin shaped hearts give me a hand haha = ) PS i still use linux on my desktop so im not selling out to microsoft, just want to use the XBOX Live = )

You should be able to use the XP CD to delete the partition/s & recreate one for Windows. That's one of the first things it does if I recall is to ask you where you want it installed. At least with the XP Pro CD. Anyway, beyond that you could use a Win98 bootdisk that has the fdisk program on it. Using fdisk you can delete all the paritions and "fdisk /mbr" will remove the linux bootloader from the MBR if present. Else you could use a linux bootdisk/CD and use fdisk on it to delete all the parititions as well. If lilo is the bootloader you're using, then "lilo -u" will remove it, not sure about grub.

I like a nice, compact partitioning program, like bootitng. You can download it here: http://www.terabyteunlimited.com . The trial is free, and it can fit into a floppy disk! It can even resize ntfs partitions without data loss. You can use it to delete the linux partition.

yes but you should always back up your files

Thank you all,

I actually found out the reason I was having this problem, Microsoft XP instal disk cannot write over linux because it cannot read the hdd(because its reiserfs) So I went into the console and type CFDISK it brought up a list of partitions for my linux system I basically just deleted every single Partition and inserted the Microsoft xp disk and shutdown. The windows disk then was able to read the hdd since the linux system was deleted


Thanks!!



PS the little penguin between the <ctrl> and <Alt> is a good idea!!!