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Reformatting Linux partition on a dual boot machine?

H

hyrum

Member
I have a dual boot machine running off of one hard drive. I have Linux on a 10GB partition and XP on a 20GB partition.

I haven't used Linux as much as I thought I would so now want to reclaim that 10GB back and use it in XP. I also need to remove the Grub boot loader and switch back to an XP boot.

Does anyone have any information on how to do this painlessly of have a link to a site?
 
I HAVE and I have found nothing useful. Since there isn't fdisk in XP that eliminates most of what comes up in searches. I came here as a last resort and I get this answer
rolleye.gif
 
Well, it is the most obvious solution. Quite a few people don't bother to look or don't look very hard, so when a question is asked that's such a common issue, there's bound to be a solution on Google.

And looky here, the first result searching for "uninstall grub": http://www.gnu.org/manual/grub-0.92/html_node/FAQ.html

Ooh, and here's another: http://sdb.suse.de/en/sdb/html/fhassel_deinstall_grub.html

To regain the drive space as part of the same partition you have XP on, you'll have to have an application like Partition Magic that can resize the XP partition after deleting the Linux partition. There are other apps, I think one free one that actually comes with most Linux distros.

Microsoft also describes how to fix the boot record to remove Lilo, which should work for Grub as well (the fdisking part). http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;315224

I'm sure Grub has a similar command to remove itself. Microsoft also specifically says to just use fdisk, but the Recovery Console for XP as described in the second link also has a specific way to do it that might be safer.
 
Ok here is what I ended up doing...

I used the recovery console and then did fixmbr. It kept telling me that my admin password was wrong so I changed the local security setting for recovery console to not require a password (and then changed it back when I was done).

So fixmbr did what I needed. I then used diskpart and wiped out the Linux partition.

When I booted back into Windows, I then formatted my new partition and it works fine 🙂
 
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