Getting rid of redhat
Everytime i delete the redhat partition and try to install something new, the boot loader, grub i believe its called, is still there. Is there any way i can get rid of it?
0
Comments
Type fixmbr, hit enter, reboot.
Problem solved.
Ranish it or use the mfr disk utils and zero pack drive. If Western Digital, they have diagnostics and zero-packign from Kroll-Ontrack, version 5.03, on their website. You need blank floppy for that, the pack will make bootable floppy. Boot from floppy, and that version will erase\zero-pack a HD of 80 GB in size in about 30 minutes. OLD versions will take overnight on same drive, they acess drive at UDMA 2 or less (about UDMA\33 speed, or less depending on version of old utils you have around from Western Digital. Maxtor has those Diags customed for Maxtor drives also, do nto know time as I last zero-packed one of those about 9 years ago and that was an older version which took overnight (about 10 hours). Wipe drive in fastest computer, will go faster, and use floppy boot to utils disk to start up.
Ranish Partition Manager can remove boot sectors and Master Boot Record. With both, expect NOT to have any data remaining on that physical drive when done-- period. The MBR has pointers to the partition start points on HD, zero-packing in quick or full will destroy both boot loader and those pointers.
RANISH is more of an oddball little thing that needs to be put on a bootbale floppy, is real tiny, and is real fast at deleting unwanted stuff if you are willing to lose whole physical HD content. Zero-packing will happily remove wrongly installed utils for booting and over write every part of drive with binary zeros.
Both have saved my and customer's bacon many times, and resurrected some HDs that were WRONGLY marked bad by Scandisk in earlier Windows as well. Also a very good last resort way to kill boot sector viruses if floppy is write protected when machine is booted from it. NOTE, your box used for this almost HAS to be on a UPS as power failure during this process WILL leave you starting over from scratch if you zero-pack. FDISK that comes with version 98 SE can also wipe boot sectors, if you have good non-virused 98 SE windows startup disk around, but it does not know what GRUB is so have had limited success with that and you have to both delete and make parts, then wipe parts in XP installer and remake to get that to work (2000 also).
There is one other way, Linux has a couple of processes that allow you to remove boot loader, from the installer. In essence, you delete all partitions in the linux installer's custom partitioning choice for drive setup. DO NOT create any afterwards, just CTRL-ALT-DEL the box if Linux from Install CD boot will let you, or POWER OFF the box, quickly remove CD when you power it up, and stick the install CD of your preferred flavor in. AFAIK, with RH, the instructions on how to do this are in the docs in DOC CD.
For RH downloads, that CD is typically CD 3 of the set. They are in PDF form, have browsed and printed same from within Linux for various older distros. The official Linux way, is while linux is still running, to remove GRUB. Then shut down box, boot from Cd on powerup, install O\S with wipe beforehand. Once Grub is off there, even FDISK can wipe parts.
Tell you what, choose poison as far as method, then tell us which, can get more specific then, am not wanting to write that book (about 50 pages worth) just now....
John D.
Thanks for the advice Ageek but i dont want to lose all the data on the harddrive, and its too late to use the 3rd disk RH thing.
If that doesn't, there's a more rigorous solution that involves swapping primary HDDs about.
This is why GRUB and LILO warn about writing to the MBR. Heh. Good things do go bad.
EDIT:// well it didnt work, but luckily i had already backed up all my files to a different harddrive, so it was no biggy. Thanks for the help though
Couple tricks:
first, if you are going to use fixmbr, first try this
fixboot /scan
THEN fixmbr if needed.
what fixboot /scan does is FIND the XP install, and record in RAM the location of XP. THEN you can write to mbr with that info.
One further hint: BEFORE exiting your Recovery console session, and after running the above as noted, run:
chkdsk /r
Short form answer was fixmbr, yes, but the gotcha comes when there is a bad and foreign mbr\boot sector due to a loader like grub (grub sets up a non-standard mbr, and also managed to overwrite XP's boot info, so you get to find the XP install FIRST in this case-- this is what fixboot /scan does).
BTW, Disvengance, using Lilo and not havign XP on same HD will help. Lilo uses a DOS sized boot sector to install itself to. Downside, is when you want to mod how it sorks, you get to RUN it beofre rebooting.
Slack and SuSE are similar, Disvengance, and if you know Slack go for it, otherwise try SuSE 9.0. suSE is between RH and Slack in difficulty. SuSE has lots of good docs in English now, also. Slack does alot under the hood, SuSE has a decent GUI set now adn a very good updater and software manager, and also comes with RPM for installign RPM packages.
It hangs between Slack and RH. Mandrake 10 Community also hangs there, though it uses a BUNCH of Perl and has lots of scripts running under the hood. I run SuSE myself, now. Will have a Mandrake instance on HD and might go back to that after 10 Official comes out. But for now, SuSE is quite good and is a nice cross between the Slack\Deb world and RH-- under the hood, it hangs closer to Slack, and in GUI it acts "normal".
John D.-- who will also tell you folks why fixmbr did not work when run alone: fixmbr restores a 256K bootsector when it restores. Lilo uses such, grub grabs 512K for itself if it is default loaded, and repoints things in ways XP does not understand-- installing it to the Linux first partition gives you in essence a boot chainload, which I hate to deal with the quirks of. So, if you want a basic easy recovery from a Linux and Windows combined install on one hard drive, install Lilo instead of Grub as Linux bootloader. I went around that "messy wall" by simply putting XP on one IDE\Coldswap master HD in a carrier\tray and SuSE in another.
SuSE runs with grub, XP HD is not in computer while SuSE is up. To switch, I simply shut down whichever is running, (to shutdown or full power off), then unlock my IDE bay lock with its key, pull out one carrier, insert other carrier, and lock bay again and power up box. About 1 minute 45 seconds to switch HDs on the P4 box from SuSE power down request to XP totally up and in GUI. AND ZERO boot sector or partition recovery\transformation\mangling messes. If I fubar XP, it will never be with Linux. And vice versa.