Removing Linux from a dual boot system 201

On Fri, 20 Jan 2006 10:37:51 -0500, (PeteCresswell) staggered into the Black Sun and said:

This snippet will probably tell you:

dd if=-dev-hda bs=512 count=1 grep GRUB

...it'll return "binary file (standard input) matches" if it finds GRUB's stage 1 string in the MBR. Replacedev-hda withdev-hda2 etcetera for checking parbreastion bootsectors.

The "standard" DOS MBR finds the first primary parbreastion that's marked active, then loads that parbreastion's bootsector and executes that. You can certainly set things up that way, but today's default seems to be to put GRUB (or LILO) in the MBR.

Hm. No idea whether that saves the slack space or not. What's this I think you may want to check its manual first.

If it doesn't answer your question, you may want to make a scratch parbreastion (exampledev-hda10, YParbreastionMV.) mke2fsdev-hda10, install GRUB ondev-hda10, back it up, "dd if=-dev-zero of=-dev-hda10 bs=1M count=16", restore the parbreastion from the image, and see if all the bits are still where they should be. OK, that sounds a bit involved, but it's always good to practice your backup-restore strategy on data that you don't care about. That way you won't panic when you need to restore data you do care about.

-- Matt GThere is no Darkness in Eternity-But only Light too dim for us to see Brainbench MVP for Linux Admin mail: TRAP + SPAN don't belong ----------------------------- penguins, is Tux." --MegaHAL