how do you remove GRUB from Linux?

I bricked my computer. My computer that has my work on it. I was trying to install Linux Mint 7 on it, doing the linux dual boot GRUB on a separate partition. Mint loaded on the partition, but never would fuction, I would just get a black screen. The GRUB bootloader also didn’t respond to the command to switch back to XP at all, so it was a brick fest totally. I decide the thing to do is to delete the partiton that Mint is on. So I get that pulled off. But GRUB still exists. And it bricks my system because it can’t see Linux. I can’t get Windows back, with my hard drive of stuff I need.

I got on the internet and found people telling folks to get a windows or dos CD and get it to boot to the command prompt and running fdisk /mbr to fix it. I can’t find my XP disc, but I was able to download a dos 6.22 disc. I have it on 3.5 somewhere so its legal. :slight_smile: The problem is the hard drive isn’t recognized.

How do I fix this? I am lost and I promise the SDMB I won’t ask any more linux questions if you guys can bail me out of this.

Get a copy of the Ultimate Boot CD and use that - your DOS boot disk fdisk cannot deal with modern large disks, but the fdisk on UBCD should do the trick.

Si

Any XP disc will work. Can you get one from a friend? UBCD may require a windows disc for licensing reasons, so that may not work. I would not play with any dos based as its far too old.

If you just need some files then download ubuntu, run it in live mode, and copy your files to a usb drive or wherever.

Acutally I was able to get the UBCD to work, what I did was get it to load, then ran its modified FDISK that had NTFS support, and set the windows partition to the number one active partition. That seemed to wipe away any of GRUB.

:slight_smile:

I was going to try for Xubuntu, but the installer for Xubuntu won’t recognize the fact that the computer has Windows XP on it now… HMMM…