Remove Win dual boot?

[Gerard Snitselaar]

I've always been under the impression that the Master Boot Record is
always located in the first sector of a disk, not in one of the 
partitions. You can change which partition is active (bootable) with
fdisk or qparted. If the system is already dual-booting it shouldn't
be difficult to remove Windows from the picture. 

On Sat, 2006-02-25 at 19:36 -0700, Dennis Kibbe wrote:
> On Saturday 25 February 2006 06:14, mike enriquez wrote:
> > 			Got a newbie question here for some of you?
> > I want to remove windows from my dual boot computer. How can I do this
> > without messing up my Red Hat WS.
> > Any help would be appreciated.
> > Thanks.
> > Mike Enriquez
> > el newbie  :)
> 
> Hi Mike,
> 
> Funny, I was talking to Hans Reiser just the other day about doing exactly 
> that.  He was a speaker at SCaLE 4+.
> 
> Here are the issues you'll face.
> 
> 1.  The MBR is most likely on the WIndows partition.  You can run cfdisk (or 
> fdisk) as root to see what partiton is marked bootable.  If it is then you'll 
> want to leave the partiton.
> 
> 2.  You can resize the Windows partition down, but you won't be able to move 
> the Linux partition into the resulting space (or. at least, no easily) unless 
> EXT3 is different than ReiserFS.
> 
> The safest thing to do is to remove as many programs and as much data from the 
> Windows partition as you can, then run Disk Cleanup, Scandisk and defrag.  
> Then you can resize the Windows partition down as low as it will go plus 
> about 512MB so Windows as some elbow room to boot.  You can use the latest 
> KNOPPIX disk to do this.
> 
> Next create a new partiton in the free space and mount it as whatever you like 
> (/data, /extra. etc.) so Red Hat can use it.
> 
> One person I talked to at SCaLE always sets up computers using LVM so resizing 
> is a trivial thing.  I don't know if you'd have that option now.  [Anyone 
> care to comment?]
> 
> Or the easiest thing to do might be to wait for the next major Red Hat 
> release, backup your data and then do a fresh install.
> 
> Dennisk
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