Uninstalling Mandriva

[Guest rza_bgy]

Dear Friends

Please

I have installed Mandriva 6 and Win XP on same drive©, leaving only 2 gb of free space...I have difficulty in defraging,copying...so I want to know how to Uninstall or Move Mandriva to my D drive and restore partitions.

Thanks

Edited July 3, 2006 by rza_bgy

[ianw1974]

You can do it, but there are quite a few steps involved in doing it and it isn't always easy and straightforward. If you've just installed Mandriva, then the easiest and quickest is just to delete the existing partitions and do a clean installation to your second hard disk instead.

[arctic]

Two options:

For uninstalling, download e.g. a Live-CD like gpated-live or Knoppix, boot with it and start the partitioning tool and reformat the Linux partitions e.g. as VFAT partitions. Then they will be accessible from Windows again

 

For moving Mandriva, I suggest to do a clean install as moving an OS from one drive to another is a lengthy and problematic thing and definitely not something for new Linux users. Thus, the best approach is to boot the install CD, rearrange the partitions with Mandrivas partitioner as needed (remove unneeded partitions, create new ones, but - if possible - don't touch the partition where you have WinXP installed) and proceed with the installation. That's about all you have to do.

 

Edit: Ian typed at the same time as me and was faster again. :D

[Gowator]

I third the opinions above .. its actually quite easy and trivial to do but requires quite a bit of knowledge... describing how to do it is a bit like describing how to ride a bike to someone ... and the potential for disaster is always there if you do something wrong.

 

If reinstall isn't going to be a major hassle then its the safest option.

[tonyj]

I have installed Mandriva but the partition got corrupted and it won't now run. I was nervous about deleting the linux partions as linux boot loader runs at start up and gives me option to run windows or linux (linux fails currently). I don't want to muck up windows- can I/should I first delete boot loader so PC always boots to windows then delete the linux partitionsa nd reinstall mandriva?

[scarecrow]

You surely can. Just boot from your windows installation CD, and instead of going for a regular installation drop to recovery console mode. From there, give first a "fixboot" command, and if that fails, "fixmbr". Only one command at every boot, please!

But if you want to reattempt installing Mandriva, you can do it straightaway... it's partitioning tool is way better than the windoze one.