Format partition if it's boot?

[thunderbirdje]

Hi

I'm ready to get rid of my Vista partition! Wiha :D But... Is it that easy?

My situation:

Laptop came with Vista -> Transformed in dual boot VISTA + UBUNTU.

I am wondering if I just can format the NTFS partition (sda1 - see below for fdisk info-) without damaging 'the booting of my laptop'? Maybe GRUB is on sda1? If I format it... will my laptop still (spontaneous) boot?


Disk /dev/sda: 160.0 GB, 160041885696 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 19457 cylinders, total 312581808 sectors
Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x23fca1d1

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sda1 * 63 258973549 129486743+ 7 HPFS/NTFS
/dev/sda2 299933550 310211264 5138857+ 83 Linux
/dev/sda3 310215150 312576704 1180777+ 82 Linux swap / Solaris
/dev/sda4 258983865 299933549 20474842+ 83 Linux

Partition table entries are not in disk order

Thanks in advance :-)

[caljohnsmith]

Yes, make sure you format the sda1 partition and not delete it, because if you delete it, your partition numbering might change and make your computer unbootable until you reinstall Grub. :)

[thunderbirdje]

Thanks! It worked! :D Wauw great!

I'm just curious... how can you see when GRUB is on the partition or in the MBR?

[dabl]

Here's everything you ever want to know about Grub, and then some:

http://users.bigpond.net.au/hermanzone/p15.htm

:)

[caljohnsmith]

Thanks! It worked! :D Wauw great!

I'm just curious... how can you see when GRUB is on the partition or in the MBR?
I'm glad everything went OK. :) And about Grub being on a partition or in the MBR, actually Grub is in both places; if you boot your drive on start up and get a Grub menu, that means you have Grub installed to the MBR of that drive, but in order to work, Grub also has boot files that it needs in some other partition (in your case, the Ubuntu partition), specifically the Grub "stage2" file and the menu.lst. If you want to know whether a particular drive has a Grub MBR or a Windows MBR, you can do:

sudo dd if=/dev/sda count=1 2>/dev/null | strings | grep -ie grub -ie "missing operating system"
And replace sda with the drive in question. If that command returns "GRUB", you have Grub in the MBR, but if it returns "Missing operating system", you have a Windows MBR.

That link that dabl gave is a great place to start if you want to learn more about Grub. Anyway, cheers and have fun. :)