Camaleón wrote: > Guido Martínez wrote: > > I recently borrowed a hard drive and installed debian on it, alongside > > windows. I used it for a couple of weeks. > > > > Later, I tried to remove debian by deleting the partitions I had > > installed it on, but that caused grub to fail horribly, and I had to > > reinstall debian. How can I remove debian? Can I make grub ignore that > > partition and then delete it? > > I don't understand what's your final goal, let's see...
Guido says his goal is to remove Debian from the computer and enable it to boot without it. > You have a hard disk with windows and debian installed on different > partitions. Fine. > > GRUB is the default bootloader which allows you to boot into Debian or > windows. Fine. > > You have deleted/formatted your Debian partitions. Fine. Then you > reinstalled it (? - this was not needed at all). Incorrect. It was needed. Grub's MBR will look for (names depending upon the version of grub) the next stage loaders and look for its configuration file in /boot/grub/ and will fail if that partition is not available. Once Guido removed that partition then it was no longer available and grub would not be able to boot any system. The solution for Guido was to install Debian again so that a new install of grub would then have all files present. Then using it he could boot both the newly re-installed Debian and the existing Windows. > Now what do you want to do? What do you want to get? Do you want to keep > your Windows install and use the windows bootloader? If yes, there is a > "fixmbr" command you can run from within windows recovery console to > restore windows NT loader. Unfortunately MS has chosen not to include that command on at least Vista Home for example. After hitting a very similar problem myself I found that MS did not include the tools necessary to repair the MBR on a Vista Home installation and I believe not on other "Home" versions. Or at least the Acer factory installation of Vista Home on the machine I was working with did not include the necessary tools. The only solution I found was to boot 3rd party rescue disks and then use tools from them to repair the mbr. See my posting for the full details. > Hint: next time, instead installing GRUB into the MBR you can leave it on > the first sector of a partition and mark the GRUB's partition with the > bootable flag, this way you keep your windows bootloader intact if you > decide to remove linux afterwards. That is good advice. In my case I did not plan to ever restore the windows boot loader. But over time the plan changed. Bob
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