clear the MBR after FC4 removal

[Lorenzo Sandini]

Hi,

Moving my FC4 install to a bigger machine, and recycling the old computer to 
be a windows xp desktop computer.

Booted from the WinXP CD, formatted the whole drive, and hoped the MBR would 
be overwritten and clean, but it is not.

On reboot, I am offerend to choose between Win XP and "former OS", which 
obviously needs nowhere.

fdisk /mbr doesn't do a thing. How can I get rid of the reference to the 
former OS in the boot menu ? I know I can edit the boot.ini, but is there any 
trace of FC4 on the HDD that needs to be cleared ?

Lorenzo

[James Wilkinson]

[e-mail] wrote:
> Moving my FC4 install to a bigger machine, and recycling the old computer to 
> be a windows xp desktop computer.
>
> Booted from the WinXP CD, formatted the whole drive, and hoped the MBR would 
> be overwritten and clean, but it is not.
>
> On reboot, I am offerend to choose between Win XP and "former OS", which 
> obviously needs nowhere.
>
> fdisk /mbr doesn't do a thing. How can I get rid of the reference to the 
> former OS in the boot menu ? I know I can edit the boot.ini, but is there any 
> trace of FC4 on the HDD that needs to be cleared ?

You're using all of the disk for Windows? (You can check in Disk
Manager.)

You can boot properly into Windows XP?

It doesn't sound like this is Grub's MBR: it sounds like it's an entry
in boot.ini.

To be honest, there's nowhere else for Fedora to hide.

Go ahead and (carefully) edit boot.ini.

Hope this helps,

James.

[Tim]

On Mon, 2006-02-06 at 09:38 +0100, [e-mail] wrote:
> Hi,
>
> Moving my FC4 install to a bigger machine, and recycling the old computer to 
> be a windows xp desktop computer.
>
> Booted from the WinXP CD, formatted the whole drive, and hoped the MBR would 
> be overwritten and clean, but it is not.
>
> On reboot, I am offerend to choose between Win XP and "former OS", which 
> obviously needs nowhere.
>
> fdisk /mbr doesn't do a thing. How can I get rid of the reference to the 
> former OS in the boot menu ? I know I can edit the boot.ini, but is there any 
> trace of FC4 on the HDD that needs to be cleared ?
>
> Lorenzo

I use a Win98 floppy and boot from that, then use fdisk /mbr and then
use fdisk to remove all partitions.  Then create a DOS partition the
maximum size of the drive, format it.  Reboot from the floppy after
doing every step.  The long way around but it works for me.

You might just check with fdisk what it sees as partitions on the drive,
you may still have a small partition for FC4 (non DOS) by booting from
the floppy only.

Tim...

[Mikkel]

[e-mail] wrote:
> Hi,
>
> Moving my FC4 install to a bigger machine, and recycling the old computer to 
> be a windows xp desktop computer.
>
> Booted from the WinXP CD, formatted the whole drive, and hoped the MBR would 
> be overwritten and clean, but it is not.
>
> On reboot, I am offerend to choose between Win XP and "former OS", which 
> obviously needs nowhere.
>
> fdisk /mbr doesn't do a thing. How can I get rid of the reference to the 
> former OS in the boot menu ? I know I can edit the boot.ini, but is there any 
> trace of FC4 on the HDD that needs to be cleared ?
>
> Lorenzo

Run fixmbr from the XP recovery console.

Mikkel

On Mon, Feb 06, 2006 at 09:38:50AM +0100, [e-mail] wrote:
> Hi,
>
> Moving my FC4 install to a bigger machine, and recycling the old computer to 
> be a windows xp desktop computer.
>
> Booted from the WinXP CD, formatted the whole drive, and hoped the MBR would 
> be overwritten and clean, but it is not.
>
> On reboot, I am offerend to choose between Win XP and "former OS", which 
> obviously needs nowhere.
>
> fdisk /mbr doesn't do a thing. How can I get rid of the reference to the 
> former OS in the boot menu ? I know I can edit the boot.ini, but is there any 
> trace of FC4 on the HDD that needs to be cleared ?
>
> Lorenzo

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda bs=1 count=446
will clear the MBR. Of course /dev/hda depends on the place of the
MBR.

[Jeff Vian]

On Mon, 2006-02-06 at 09:38 +0100, [e-mail] wrote:
> Hi,
>
> Moving my FC4 install to a bigger machine, and recycling the old computer to 
> be a windows xp desktop computer.
>
> Booted from the WinXP CD, formatted the whole drive, and hoped the MBR would 
> be overwritten and clean, but it is not.
>
> On reboot, I am offerend to choose between Win XP and "former OS", which 
> obviously needs nowhere.
>
> fdisk /mbr doesn't do a thing. How can I get rid of the reference to the 
> former OS in the boot menu ? I know I can edit the boot.ini, but is there any 
> trace of FC4 on the HDD that needs to be cleared ?
>
> Lorenzo

boot to console in repair mode and run fixmbr
That rewrites the MBR with the ntloader active.

[John Francis]

On 07/02/06, Jeff Vian  wrote:
> On Mon, 2006-02-06 at 09:38 +0100, [e-mail] wrote:
> > Hi,
> >
> > Moving my FC4 install to a bigger machine, and recycling the old computer to
> > be a windows xp desktop computer.
> >
> > Booted from the WinXP CD, formatted the whole drive, and hoped the MBR would
> > be overwritten and clean, but it is not.
> >
> > On reboot, I am offerend to choose between Win XP and "former OS", which
> > obviously needs nowhere.
> >
> > fdisk /mbr doesn't do a thing. How can I get rid of the reference to the
> > former OS in the boot menu ? I know I can edit the boot.ini, but is there any
> > trace of FC4 on the HDD that needs to be cleared ?
> >
> > Lorenzo

This is just a boot.ini setting.  Just remove the other entry in there
and that is all you need to do.  Your MBR is fine, otherwise you
wouldn't be seeing that menu.

--
Kind regards,

John Francis