Rewrite your Master Boot Record

Hopefully you are simply interested in this rather than have just witnessed some major catastrophe befall your computer. Or like me, you are setting forth to ace GRUB and move on with your life. A few short hours ago I detailed my dissatisfaction with Ubuntu and the whole Linux experience. Well, now I aced GRUB too.

Rewrite your MBR (Master Boot Record)

This part is really simple, and the steps are the same regardless if your wanting to no longer use GRUB or LILO:

  • Insert your Windows Disc, in this case XP Pro.
  • Boot from said disc.
  • Select the Repair from recovery console option (R)
  • from the c: prompt, type HELP to see which commands are available on your discs version of DOS.

The reason I inserted this part is because there seems to be some debate on what works, and what options you can use. According to GRUB, you want to use:

FDISK/MBR

Which on my CD, was not available, but the other option was:

fixboot c:
fixmbr

So use which ever one you have available. You will get a dire warning that you could fatch your boot record and ace your partitions rendering your machine more like a doorstop than a multimedia powerhouse. Just give it the ol’ yeah yeah yeah, hit y and move on. I had zero problems with this, even though it sounds as if it could be really bad; which it can. If you totally ace your MBR – you could render your Windows install useless and have to resort to a complete rebuild – chock full of fun updates to download from Windows Update. So back your stuff up; first, and if you don’t, and your machine gets tooled – don’t contact me because I won’t help you.

Reboot your machine, and you are all set with Windows as the only boot option.

As a side note: This should work if you have a dual install of multiple Windows partitions and want to remove one.

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