removing linux and the MBR

[DeverLite]

I know, I know, tragically I am removing Red Hat Linux 7.3 from my system. But don't worry it's comming back! I have updated a whole bunch of stuff on my computer. Motherboard, proccessor, and soon, the video card and RAM. Anways, as I thought might happen Windows complained. Now, my guess is that there is some issue while booting up, that windows is finding the linux partition and going nuts. The details of the error I'm not going to bother with. The important point is that I have copied everything I need in linux to the windows partition, as well as backing everything up to CD-R. There's a lot of stuff I want to keep on the windows parition, and it would be a real pain in the butt to reinstall everything. Soo... I'm going to get rid of linux and see if this fixes the problem, if it doesn't, I can find the error with one less potential problem in the way.

Now, my issue is that I have set Linux up to use GRUB to choose which OS to boot, and picked the option to overwite the MBR when I installed. However, now I have to get rid of this so the MBR will start windows directly. Once I've done this I'm just going to wipe the partition with linux on it. The only thing I dont' know how to do is fix the MBR back to the way it was. Any ideas?

[MaXimum SMOKE]

Generally, I have found that most versions of Win, I've encountered, don't know what Linux is, and just ignore the Linux partitions.. At any rate.... You use the Linux install disk and boot like you're installing. Choose custom partitioning. Use the partitioning program to remove the linux partitions, or change them to fat32 partitions. (If you try to do this under many versions of Win, you may spend fruitless time) Use the linux partitioning program to write back the partition tables to the hard disk. Guessing you are using Win 98 or Me at this point.... Boot the machine with the windows emergency startup disk, and get to the dos prompt. Issue a fdisk/mbr command. Unless you have a custom boot sector, or something else you forgot to tell us, this should work. All the usual "back up all your data before proceeding" disclaimers apply---

[TMAN]

I have never had a reason to uninstall linux then reinstall if there was a major hardware change. I know this is after the fact but you should've been able to simply reinstall linux (extreme minimum. just kernel and boot loader maybe) and just delete the old kernels.

Smoke: you actually came across a windows that actually mounted the linux partitions?

[MaXimum SMOKE]

TMAN,
I've seen people try to get rid of what windows fdisk refers to as an extended partition containing logical drives....
So you tell it to delete the logical drives... It tells you that none exist to delete... So tell it to delete the partition.... It tells you can't do it while logical drives exist.... Great fun. It can really get on your nerves if you don't know about it. BTW you used to be able to get a DOS utility that will let you see, and read files from a Linux partition, but haven't seen it in a while. They were strictly a DOS c.l.i type utility.

Hmmm this may be it...
http://distro.ibiblio.org/pub/Linux/...rent/dosutils/

(descript. from page, below)
LTOOLS: A set of programs for DOS, Windows 3.x/9.x and Windows NT
| to read and write on linux (ext2) partitions.