If for any reason you want to uninstall Mandriva Linux, you can do so. The process of uninstalling Mandriva Linux is done in two steps:
Remove the bootloader, LILO in this example,
from the Master Boot Record (MBR). To do so, execute
lilo -U in a console, as
root
. Doing this will not only uninstall LILO
but will also restore the previous master boot record, if
any.
If you have a different boot loader, please refer to its documentation to determine how to regenerate the master boot record.
Delete all partitions
related to Mandriva Linux on your hard drive (usually
partitions hosting ext3 file systems and the Swap
partition) and — optionally — replace them
with a single partition using fdisk.
Open a terminal
window and run fdisk /dev/hda (if the hard
disk containing Mandriva Linux is other than the
1st IDE disk, change
/dev/hda
accordingly).
Use the
p
command to display partition
information, and then use the d
command to delete all unneeded partitions.
If you want to
create a single partition, use the
c
command, specify
1
as the partition number, make it
use the whole space available, and when asked for the
partition type use the L
command to
list the supported partition types and choose the right
one for the OS you plan to install later. Some examples:
c
for a FAT32 (Windows®
9x) partition, 7
for a NTFS
(Windows® NT/Windows® 2000/XP) partition,
83
for a GNU/Linux
partition. Finally use the w
command to write changes back to disk.
Once this is done, just reset or shutdown the machine “the hard way”.