Getting a functional MBR back for Windows ME

[Guest]

OK, so here's the deal. I'm selling my old craptacular Celeron and building a new machine. I had both Windows ME and Red Hat Linux 7.1 running on this computer. I have to remove Linux from the old machine in order to sell it but I'm having trouble..

I used fdisk to remove the Linux partitions and gave the space back to Windows but I can't get rid of Lilo..

I used to fdisk /mbr command and this only made things worse. Now when I reboot, sometimes it goes right into Windows like it's supposed to, sometimes it loads Lilo and sometimes it just goes straight to my BIOS and stops there!

What's going on?? Will formatting the drives and re-installing ME fix this? Any other ideas?

I appreciate any input.

- Corri

"The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources"
- Albert Einstein

 

[girish]

no formatting win/dos drives wont help. fdisk does not recognise linux partitions so it doesnt touch them.

if you boot from a linux cd and delete the linux partitions from the disk druid then you can boot back into windows/dos and reclaim the space with new partitions.

girish

<font color=red>No system is fool-proof. Fools are Ingenious!</font color=red>

 

[jasen]

Actually, fidisk has no problem seeing or deleting linux or non-dos partitions. His problem is in the boot loader/mbr area of the drive, before the partition map. And honestly, "fdisk /mbr" has always worked to remove lilo for me. There may be something else wrong with the partitioning or drive. The fact that it dumps into the BIOS indicates more than a simple partition problem anyway. Generally hardware errors cause that.
Partition Magic might do a cleaner job of this than fdisk as well.

 

[girish]

maybe some fdisk versions delete non-DOS partitions (linux partition is recognised by fdisk as non-dos), but when you try to delete it doesnt delete it, and then you cant delete the extended one, and in turn the primary one.

you have installed linux, so ought to have linux cd, boot off that cd and run disk druid or linux fdisk. thats always the best option. you know what you are deleting.

fdisk/mbr retains the partition table but resets the boot code to the default dos mbr code. lilo is overwritten. in your case, there must be some hardware error for sure, or some linkage error.

in such scenario it makes sense to delete all partitions from linux and redoing the partitions.

girish

<font color=red>No system is fool-proof. Fools are Ingenious!</font color=red>

 

[Bardic]

Download Part, www.ranish.com, boot to dos and run it and change the Master Boot Record from Unknown IPL to Standard IPL. You may have to do a "sys a: c:" after this. Any Win98 boot disk will do.

This should work to remove all of the Linux stuff. And it is an excellent replacement for Fdisk (on the fly quick formatting and multiple boot drives.)

Later,
Bardic