I have a dual-boot (XP/SuSE) with WinXP on the primary partition and SuSE on the extended partition. SuSE has been installed on an HDD with pre-existing WinXP. When installing SuSE, GRUB was written in the master boot record of the primary (WinXP) partition. My task: wiping off the MBR to enable clean re-install of WinXP, then re-partitioning the HDD and installing SuSE. My problem: GRUB is stuck in MBR and does not want to be wiped off :-) What I tried: 1) fdisk (starting from Win 95 bootdisk throught to Win 98 bootdisk) - deleted and re-created partitions, set a primary (and active) partition, formatted c: /u /s - GRUB is still in MBR. To be fair I have not tried a WinXP Pro bootdisk set - currently downloading and will give it a try tonight. 2) Partition Magic 8 bootdisk - deleted everything of the disk, created a single partition, formatted it as NTFS, rebooted - GRUB is still in MBR. 3) WinXP installation CD - booted from it, went to Recovery Console mode, fixboot - Yes; fixmbr - Yes, rebooted - GRUB is still in MBR. It seems like whatever I do is just not enough to get GRUB out of MBR. Any ideas and help are much appreciated. Also, one more question: if I have a dual-boot WinXP/Linux system, what is more preferable, convenience-safety-wise: installing GRUB into MBR on the primary (active) partition (in my case, WinXP partition) or having it in the MBR of the extended partition (in my case, the Linux partition)?

I think you use fdisk with the command "fdisk /mbr". This should "repair"/replace the mbr.

regarding safety, I always put my bootloader on diskette and never touch the hard drive mbr.

FYI you only have one MBR (Master Boot Record). Each partition can have a boot section but only one can be the master and is usually on /dev/hda or /dev/sda. I personally always use the MBR, but each to their own. I also keep boot floppies. Deleting and formatting partitions will not affect any boot loaders. Just installing XP from the CD (or any windoze version) will overwrite your boot loader for you (with no warning....thanx Bill!). You can delete it by hand from within linux with: # dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda bs=512 count=1 You can do the same but keep the partition table intact with: # dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda bs=446 count=1

There's an old M$ NT floppy prog called 'disksave' saved my ss many times. Backs up MBR & Bootsector. Install windoz, run disksave & anytime you have problems, just reinstall clean MBR &or bootsector. Don't know what happens if you decide to re-partition windoz though. lynnevan