Computer Peeps - Assemble

[EROK81?]

I have a windows laptop.

One day I had the bright idea to dual boot with Linux as I wanted to learn more Linux. I never used it. Fast forward to now. My hard drive was tapped and I needed the room Linux was taking up...Linux was my main boot.

Like the smrt guy I am, I just deleted the Linux partition from Windows. Restarted my computer a few days later and got the grub screen for linux. It took me a few days but finally figured out the linux commands to get it to boot.

Now I am ready to reformat but here is where my question comes in. I deleted the MBR along with the linux partition. If I reformat will that fix the boot loader? The only way I can boot now is from Linux. If I get rid of Linux completely, I'll be screwed.

So will the reformat fully restore my computer, and the boot loader, to factory specs?

 

[78mitsu]

Not necessarily, I've had windoze installs fails because it doesn't always know what to do with the MBR/Boot sector after linux has written to it. Boot a knoppix or fbsd rescue disk erase the beginning and end of the disk using dd dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/da0 count=1024 bs=512. Depending on the overall length use the same command only add skip='<length of dis>. It'll make sure you get both of the *partition* tables.