hey I need help. I have two physical HDDs c and d. D had two logical partitions at 40 gig each and C had 120 gig. C had win xp pro and D had mandrake and red hat.

The problem is that I needen more space and so I took off the linux os's from the D drive. I then reformated the disk as a clean ntfs drive that win could see. Now my only problem is that there is a startup screen that says mandrake linus and that still allows me to choose from the os's that are not there. This is very anoying and I can t get rid of it.


Not in boot.ini
cant find in registry
no more linux files that i can find

HELP

Sounds like you have a lilo still written in the master boot record of your hard drive.

Boot from a Windows XP CD, choose to recover instead of install. Choose the recovery console. Log onto your system in the console, and use these commands

fixmbr
fixboot

reboot and all should be well, post back if its not.

any way around it w/o the cd.

tut tut tut.. you should have the CD!

Mictlantecuhtli is right.

You can try SBM (Small Boot Manager), which is my personal favorite.. extremely small, very flexible, very powerful, and super easy to install and use.

http://btmgr.sourceforge.net

yeah basically get something in your master boot record that's nicer. The software that Harvester suggests is not a bad idea.

can any1 help me i want 2 install Linux for the first time how do i go abt installing it and which version do i need and the steps of installing linux.

Linux

Get the newest version of Ubuntu because it is the easiest to use for newb's to Linux. Make a CD of the image ( ISO ) you downloaded and the just reboot to the CD the rest is easy and pretty self explanatory. Once you are used to Linux and learn the shell commands then you might choose to try another distro like Fedora ( Red Hat )