Uninstalling Mandrake

[tim545666]

I have recently installed Linux Mandrake to learn about Linux, it turns out that it is not teaching me anything and it looks like a Mac interface, so I am planning on geting rid of it and installing Red Hat 7.0, or maybe go back to Winblows for the time being. How do I unstall it, and how do I figure out how to un-partition the hard drive? Keep in mind that I am a COMPLETE LINUX NEWBIE so I really will not understand technical talk. Thank you for your help.

[tim545666]

Also, I will be satisfied if I can just get back into Windows 95 as a dual-boot system, it is on the hard drive but on a seperate partition thatn Mandrake.

[cyan]

Well, I think it kind of depends on what you want to do. If you're going to replace it with a different linux distro, you should be able to just use the same Mandrake partions for the new distro. (I.E. when you install the new distro, just tell it to use the Mandrake partitions) If you want to give the partition back to Windows, I think you'll have to mess with fdisk a little in Windows, which I really haven't done enough to give advice on, sorry.

Also, if you can't get into Windows right now, just put a dos boot disk in, start you're puter and at the prompt type

fdisk /mbr

This will replace LiLo with the windows loader (I'm sure it has some technical name but, oh well) NOTE: this will make it impossible to boot Mandrake without a custom bootdisk, so make sure you have one, before you do that.

Is Windows a bootable option now? I mean, when Grub (LiLo, whatever) comes up, do you have an option to boot to Windows?

[bdg1983]

Not learning anything from one distro so you want to install another?

They are all roughly the same underneath the GUI desktop. Just starting using the commandline to learn Linux commands properly. You can open up a xterm to do this.

If you still want to delete Linux, then Windows fdisk will not detect Linux ext2 partitions. Use the Linux fdisk to delete the ext2 and swap and recreate fat32 partitions if you like. Partition Magic will do the same if you have it or search for partitioning tools at freshmeat.net.