Newb Help with Uninstalling SLED on Laptop

[bosoxxrwd]

Hi, Im struggling to find a clear and simple way to wipe my hard drive of my SUSE Linux Enterprise 10 on my Lenovo laptop that came pre installed. I go to school with windows and have windows at home so it is not convenient for me to have linux. I want to just remove Linux and I have a Windows XP 2004 cd to install from. I do not have a floppy disk drive on the latop. Thank you

[gogalthorp]

It has been awhile, but if I recall you simply tell XP to install on the partition you wish to install it on. There is a DOS utility called fdisk, run this to redo any partitioning you want. I believe that this can be done at the start of the install.

be sure the BIOS is set to boot from the CD insert the CD restart and the install process will start.

[bosoxxrwd]

ok, ive tried just booting from the xp cd and trying to install it but the windows blue screen says that it cannot find any hard drives. I also tried booting from the cd and using (R) for the recovery console and that did not work.

I cannot tell xp to install on a particular partition because it doesnt even recognize any.

How do I run the DOS utility fdisk and where would I run that, in linux etc?

[jayd512]

The Windows installer should install over everything on the drive. Are you telling it to install on free space, on on the whole drive? You may want to just wipe the hard drive with Gparted, and then try to install XP. But just make sure to have a Linux CD close at hand... just in case

[gogalthorp]

ok, ive tried just booting from the xp cd and trying to install it but the windows blue screen says that it cannot find any hard drives. I also tried booting from the cd and using (R) for the recovery console and that did not work.

I cannot tell xp to install on a particular partition because it doesnt even recognize any.

How do I run the DOS utility fdisk and where would I run that, in linux etc?

If the Windows installer can not see a hard drive there is a hardware/configuration problem. Basically this should not happen.

If you can see the hard drive but no partitions you must tell the installer to repartition. As I recall this is in an obscure selection near the bottom of the first or second screen.

You really should seek help from a Windows group or find someone local to help since this is a Windows problem not a Linux one. I have not dealt with Windows installs for sometime so I forget the exact layout of the screens but there is an option to reformat/repartition a drive in the installer somewhere.

Or as suggested you could use the a gparted disk to repartition.

[oz]

I want to just remove Linux and I have a Windows XP 2004 cd to install from.

Welcome to the forums!

The easiest/quickest way to wipe a drive of all content, in my opinion, is to go to a terminal, su to root, and issue the following command:

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda bs=512 count=1

You'll need to replace /dev/sda with your actual device name such as /dev/hda.

Using the dd command above will write zeros to the entire drive giving you a totally fresh start.

If needed, you can use the fdisk -l command to determine your device name:

fdisk -l

That's a lower-case letter L in the command, and not a number 1.

Once all that's done, you should be able to boot your Windows installation CD to install Windows.

Good luck with it.