Appendix B. Removing Red Hat Linux
To uninstall Red Hat Linux from your system, you will
need to remove the GRUB or LILO information from your master boot record
(MBR).
In DOS, NT, and Windows 95 you can use the Windows
fdisk utility to create a new MBR with the
undocumented flag /mbr. This
will ONLY rewrite the MBR to boot the primary DOS
partition. The command should look like the following:
If you need to remove Linux from a hard drive and have attempted to
do this with the default DOS (Windows) fdisk,
you will experience the Partitions exist but they do not
exist problem. The best way to remove non-DOS partitions is
with a tool that understands partitions other than DOS.
To begin, insert the Red Hat Linux CD and boot your system. Once you have
booted off the CD, you will receive a boot prompt. At the boot prompt,
type: linux rescue. This will start the rescue mode
program.
You will be prompted for your keyboard and language requirements. Enter
these values as you would during the installation of Red Hat Linux.
Next, a screen will appear telling you that the program will now
attempt to find a Red Hat Linux install to rescue. Select
Skip on this screen.
After selecting Skip, you will be given a
command prompt where you can access the partitions you would like to
remove.
First, type the command list-harddrives. This
command will list all hard drives on your system that are recognizable by
the installation program, as well as their size in megabytes.
 | Warning |
|---|
| | Be careful to remove only the necessary
Red Hat Linux partitions. Removing other partitions could result in data loss or
a corrupted system environment. |
To remove partitions, use the partitioning utility
parted. Start parted, where
/dev/hda is the device on which to remove the
partition:
Using the print command, view the current partition
table to determine the minor number of the partition to remove:
The print command will also display the partition's
type (such as linux-swap, ext2, ext3, and so on). Knowing the type of the
partition will help you in determining whether to remove the
partition.
Remove the partition with the command rm. For
example, to remove the partition with minor number 3:
 | Important |
|---|
| | The changes start taking place as soon as
you press [Enter], so review the command before committing to it. |
After removing the partition, use the print command
to confirm that it is removed from the partition table.
Once you have removed the Linux partitions and made all of the changes
you need to make, type quit to quit
parted.
After quitting parted, type exit
at the boot prompt to exit rescue mode and reboot your system, instead of
continuing with the installation. The system should reboot automatically. If
it does not, you can reboot your computer using
[Control]-[Alt]-[Delete].
