Hello all-

I want to remove suse 9.1 personal from a dual boot drive w/ Win XP Pro. I think I can use a disk partitioner to simply remove the suse partition from the drive. How can I get rid of the boot loader grub? I want to restore XP to it's original config.

Thanks to all

If you got a bootable windoze cd, boot into it, and when it asks you to install or recover itself, press R key. Now type the admin password and then, when you are at prompt, type FIXMBR. That's it. Now you can reboot and enjoy your windozze. Macrosuxx corporation thanks you.

No man, you got me all wrong. I'm just going to put suse on it's own machine.

Hey, you didn't mention that. Anyways, FIXMBR shoult remove grub or lilo bootloader.

I am trying to do the same thing. I tried to remove RedHat 9 from my laptop using Partition Magic. I rebooted the machine, and now I get a screen that says "GRUB". Anyone know what to do?

does anyone know if a windows update cd will do the same thing or does it need to be a windows installation cd

I think the second post holds the best solution. You just didn't take the next step. You use the win xp install disk to repair the master boot record. It's not really 'broken' this step just gets rid of grub. I don't know what a windows update disk is. Is that the upgrade version or the full blown version?

Hi all,

Getting desperate here! I have a Windows XP/Suse 8.2 dual-boot system but needed to remove Suse 8.2. Following the advice on the SUSE help portal, I removed the GRUB bootloader by using the installation CD, entering Recovery mode, and using FIXMBR to restore the Win XP master boot record. The system mentions that it has "succesfully written the MBR". On rebooting the GRUB loader is indeed gone, but apparently not replaced by a correct Win XP MBR: "not able to load operating system" or such. Tried it several times from different installation CD's, also combined FIXMBR and FIXBOOT. Every time I run FIXMBR, I am warned that the MBR is non-standard - I expected that warning the first time, but not after the XP MBR had supposedly been placed there!

Anybody HELP please!!

One stupid question: is there any possibility that the problem is with the Win XP service pack 2? Could they actually have changed the MBR, such that using a pre-SP2 installation CD for FIXMBR leads to disasters?

Why is it necessary to replace GRUB with the win bootloader? You can just configure grub to load windows as default without delay. Linux partition can probably be reformatted from win as D: drive.

Ott

Thanks Ott,

You are right of course - it was not necessary, but it just seemed the easiest way. I have now restored GRUB by booting from my SUSE installation disk into the existing SUSE installation and reinstalling GRUB. Everything works again.

However, removing grub was also meant as a precaution because I am planning to switch to a different distro (Mandrake). Mandrake installs lilo by default - I don't know what happens if it discovers grub in the MBR. Is it save to wipe my SUSE partition, leave grub where it is, and just installing Mandrake?

Ton

I don't think it is a problem. All common linuxes respect the other OS-s on your hard drive, AFAIK. So I guess either Mandrake will happily accept GRUB, or it will replace GRUB with LILO. In the last case it will find out that you have win on your first partition and make it as a boot choice for lilo. Of course, you have to specify correct partition for installing Mandrake.

Actually, I have installed dual-boot system only once (RH 7.1), so do it on your own risk... :-)

Best,

Ott