I orginally had WinXP installed. I then installed Slackware on a new partition. I now wish to remove Slackware and the LILO boot loader. When installing i wrote LILO to the MBR thinge. Now if i use lilo -u /dev/hda to uninstall LILO, i get an error on starting up "missing operating system". (Luckily i had a slackware boot disk lying around to replace lilo). So how can I get rid of Slackware and LILO, but leave WinXP?

Boot into XP

If your mbr is damaged, boot the XP cdrom, drop to the recovery console, type fixmbr.

That should get you back to XP and from there you can delete your linux partitions with the disk manager utility.

BIG problem - no xp cd came with my computer! so ne other way around it?

I found out that i have the recovery console on the computer as a partition. And fixmbr just gives me the same error as lilo -u


Any other ideas?

If you can get an old 95/98 boot disk with fdisk on it you can run
to rewrite the MBR and get rid of LILO completely.

[this has already been suggested, and tried, and produced an error on start-up!]

Sorry, mis-read your post. This hasnt been tried bcos M$ says not to do it if more than 4 partitions exist, and i have more than 4.

Boot XP Recovery console.

Run chkdsk /r

You might be lucky and have the ability to check from another partition.

You might be looking at a bad sector on your MBR. In which case there is only one thing you can do... use the drive warranty and get it replaced.

If you can't restore the MBR, it sounds like your hard drive is borked or the IDE controller is gone.

Just by chance, have you used fdisk in linux to verify the windows partition is there? You might have removed your XP partitions by accident or simply corrupted the partition table.

fdisk /dev/hda

Then p for print and when done reading, q for quit (m for help)

fdisk /MBR << I think the slash and the caps make a diff.. Been a while since I have used it though.. just a thought. gl

in reply to cylix:

yes im sure winXp exists, as im on it rite now! (slackware couldnt detect network card and neva got round 2 fixing it).

so far,


"lilo -u /dev/hda" gives an error on start-up missing operating system
"fixmbr" gives the same error

and im not doing fdisk /mbr incase something goes completely wrong.

EDIT:

If i have LILO boot straight to XP without showing the prompt/menu, is it safe to remove the linux partions? Plz be very sure when you answer me here as linux as been my way-out to reconfigure LILO wen something goes wrong!

I
I have done this a million times.. nothing will go wrong.. it simply takes everything out of your mbr and totally re-writes it with the microsoft defaults.. this is the only I have ever been able to remove lilo and it has worked for me at least 10 times (million was an exageration :P )

I found a solution! When slackware was installed, LILO was written to the MBR and the linux parition set as the "active" one. So when fixmbr was run, it did fix the MBR, but for the linux partition.

The solution was:
Boot on XP
Use the disk manager to set the WinXP partion to active
Restart to System Recovery
fixmbr

and thats it sorted (i hope)

I loads straight to XP without any mention of LILO, so im hoping that means I can get rid of the linux partions now!

Thanks for all your help people!

Yes, you have successfully remove lilo and you can remove your linux partitions.

In your case, it looks like lilo was installed on the linux partition and the linux partition set active. (then you had your choice of where to boot)