Hey... I'm currently on dual-boot with XP on my laptop. There are three main partitions (the ones you need to know about...), my slack partition, a FAT32 data partition (don'te even start... I was young and naieve), and the XP FAT32 partition. I want to rid myself of Windows and the two FAT32 partitions, and turn it all into ext3, so I'm planning on taking a tarball image of the Linux partition, whacking it onto my other box, reformatting the entire drive with fdisk and then whacking the image back on to the hard-drive. I have two questions:

a) Will this actually work... (I can't see why not)
b) The Windows install was the initial install, so that partition is where the master boot record resides... What do i do about this?

This plan should be relatively safe, considering that I'll have a tarball of the drive backed up at all times. In theory, the worst thing that could happen is that for some strange reason the computer could manage to lose power, and therefore I would have no operating system to start up with again, but on the plus side I will still have the slack install disks, so I can just use my tarball to whack in all the bits I need afterwards... I just need to know what to do about that mbr...

If anyone can see any other serious issues, please raise them, even if they're just small problems that COULD happen.

Thanks.

Hello there,
Although i did not get the story ( lol ).....but whats the problem with the mbr ???
you can safely remove the Windows from yr system without any problem with the mbr, b'coz i suppose its your linux bootloader who is leading from the front and not the bootloader of Windows.
So wats the problem ?
And suppose you reformat the whole drive.....then transfer back the linux to this system....will not be it possible to reinstall lilo/grub to mbr ( just using basic commands ),as we generally do ?

regards

I distinctly remember it saying in the install that Linux was appended to the master boot record on the other partition. In fact I remember being prompted about it.

Isn't it the mbr that tells the computer to run lilo in the first place?

ok, you have your XP on c: (hda).
After that you installed linux and used Linux_Bootloader
to manage your OS:es.And now you want to delete your windows-partitions, but feel that you gonna lose your linux to because your mbr will dissapear ?

I would use my slackwareOS, via 'fdisk' to delete XP_partitions.
Then i would do/run a new 'liloconfig' (if that boot loader is to your liking) to reinstall the correct MBR (kind of ).

I haven't feelt the need, yet, to try this,
but i believe that it should work