Removing Debian and fixing the MBR.

[OmnificienT]

Hello,

Does someone know which way I can remove Debian from my system, and then reinstall grub so that it will detect Kubuntu and Windows XP?

Thank You,

OmnificienT

[Pumalite]

Erase the partition and then reinstall Grub:
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=224351

[OmnificienT]

In this post I'll explain how I removed Debian and restored the MBR. I hope it might be useful to somebody as a tutorial/guide.

Everything was done from within an already installed Kubuntu 8.04 system.

These are the steps I took:



cat /proc/partitons

This gave me an indication of the disk and partition names.

Then I used Dolphin to go to system:/media/ and found my Debian drive there (you can click it to see what's on it). I rightclicked and pressed properties.
I looked at the Meta-info tab, and saw it was known to the system as /dev/sda3

Then I opened a console and did:

sudo fdisk /dev/sda

Then I pressed "p" to print the partition table. Here I could see /dev/sda3 as a Linux partiton.

Being sure I knew I had the proper drive I now continued. I pressed "d" to delete a partition. In this case it was the 3rd one, so I pressed 3 when it asked me which partition to delete.

The final step was to enter a "w" to write the changes.



The next step was fixing my MBR.


sudo grub
It takes a while to load. Then:

find /boot/grub/stage1

This will return a location. Enter whatever was returned here:


root (hd?,?)
Now install grub to the harddisk:

setup (hd?)

And finally:

quit

Then I rebooted the system and I was relieved to see grub asking me which operating system to load.

Thank you Pumalite and catlett.

[caljohnsmith]

setup grub

Is that possibly a typo, OmnificienT? I believe the correct command is:

grub> setup (hdX)
Where (hdX) would be (hd0) to install Grub to the MBR of the first HDD.

[OmnificienT]

You were correct caljohnsmith, I fixed the typo. Thanks for the comment.