Thursday, February 7, 2008

How to remove LINUX and GRUB/LILO from doul boot machines with Windows XP

****WARNING, before attempting mentioned below please take backup of your important files we take no responsibility of any issue caused by following the steps described below*******

1. Get hold of partition manager which will be able to let you delete partitions you want to delete. ***Still GRUB or LILO could be left on the system, at the end of thsi reply I will mention how to get rid of it*****

2. You can use Linux on CD distributions like Knoppix to boot from the CD and then remover/merge linux partitions to Windows.

3. If you have XP install cd then boot from the CD, log into recovery consol, it comes with a
partitioning management utility called 'diskpart' run this utility, this utility will be able to recogise FAT32,FAT and NTFS partition, then it will show you 'UNKNOWN' partitions too, these are the ones which are usually being used by Linux (more than one). More info about this utility is on technet site.

4. Google to download Gnome (a partition editor), you should be able to find its ISO on internet, once you have it burn a CD from the ISO. Once you have bootable cd of Gnome, boot form the cd, this utility will let you manage your partitions too

5. You can also use Windows XP disk management to remove linux partitions and fix GRUB or LILO. Usually windows shows "Unknown partition". It should work for Redhat and Suse Installs.
******HOW TO REMOVE GRUB or LILO LOADER SCREEN******
As I menitoned above, boot from XP cd and go to recovery consol, then you can use FIXBOOT and FIXMBR tools to get rid of GRUB or LILO. There are few articles on these utilities available on technet.microsoft.com


Want to remove GRUB ?
http://en.opensuse.org/SDB:Uninstalling_the_Boot_Manager_GRUB_from_the_MBR

How about LILO ?
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/315224

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