Martin Steigerwald wrote: > schrieb Guido Martínez: > > 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? > > You need to install a MBR record and set the Windows partition as > bootable. Yes. That is exactly what you need to do. > Should be pretty straight forward, but I never had to do it. Unfortunately it isn't simple. And it is different depending upon many factors. I recently needed to go through this task and it was not trivial. > Otherwise you'd need some kind of Windows rescue CD/DVD and restore the > Windows boot loader from there. That is what I needed to do in my case. I *needed* to resort to booting from rescue media. You didn't say what version of windows you are using. That is unfortunate because every version is different and the answer is dependent upon it. XP Home does not have the 'fdisk /mbr' command but XP Pro does. Vista Home does not have the 'bootrec /fixmbr' command but Vista Ultimate does. Windows 7 is different again. That is the type of problem you will have trying to restore the windows main boot record (MBR) to the machine using windows tools. Searching the MS answer sites at microsoft.com I found that all of the official MS answers pointed off to third party sites. That did not inspire any confidence in me that it was going to be an easy solution. Many of the MS sites say, "If you are having MBR trouble and can't boot then click on the Start button and then ..." Of course if I could get to the start button then I would be booting! I found these following resources useful. http://www.supergrubdisk.org/ That Super Grub2 Disk disk there is very small at 1.44MB but allowed me to boot the windows system. Then after booting the windows system I could run the Vista 'bootrec /fixmbr' (or on XP I think it would be 'fdisk /mbr'). You might try that and if it works then you can bootstrap yourself to a repair. If that works for you then that is the best and simplest solution. But if you find yourself without those commands because you have a "Home" version then you will need to use a different process. That was my problem. I was trying to repair a "Vista Home" version and it didn't include either of those commands. I could boot the system using the helper disk from www.supergrubdisk.org but then the MS "Home" system didn't include the tools needed to repair itself. I kept digging and found that supposedly the Windows Recovery Environment disk would fix MBR problems. I found much documentation refering to it. They all say, "Insert your vista install disk and then ..." But of course I don't have a Vista install disk since this Acer came with Vista preinstalled and no disks for it. And the Acer "create a factory restore disk" action isn't the same thing but does something completely different. Basically I didn't get a Windows Recovery Environment disk with the system and it wasn't possible to make one using it. So then I found that many sites pointed to a neosmart.net posting http://neosmart.net/blog/2008/download-windows-vista-x64-recovery-disc/ that provides a 120MB download ISO image to create a Windows recovery disk. That worked! But I still needed to know the magic recipe to be able to use it. I found the recipe here at http://www.techsupportforum.com/376-how-to-restore-the-vista-bootloader-from-grub/ which is to boot the recovery disk and first do the automated repair using it. That said it fixed some things but the system still didn't boot afterward. I think that was a necessary but not sufficient step by itself. Then followed it with "bootrec /fixmbr" "bootrec /fixboot" commands and that finally worked! The system was repaired to being able to boot its original operating system. Two separate downloads, info on several different sites. But none of them from MS. That is so typical. And it is very unusual for me to do anything with MS systems. Ever! The above terrible experience with an MS system just reinforced to me that I shouldn't use MS systems and should stick with Debian GNU systems where things work much more easily and helpful documentation and helpful people are much more readily available. Hopefully this will be my one and only posting on the topic. Bob
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