HOWTO Remove Lilo/Grub

HOWTO Remove Lilo/Grub from your computer when you have been dual booting Windows XP and Linux and decided to remove linux and totally screwed up the hard drive so the system wouldn’t boot.
Yep that’s what I did, I had linux partitions on my laptop, needed to reclaim the space for Windows, so I opened up Partition Magic and deleted the old partitions and extended the Windows partition. Only there was a minor problem… Prior to Windows XP there was a dos command fdisk to manipulate the partitions on the drive. Fdisk had an undocumented feature fdisk /mbr that would wipe the old master boot record from the drive and install a new one that would boot the Windows C: drive. Okay so Windows XP doesn’t have fdisk, so you can always boot from an old dos floppy and run fdisk. Sorry no floppy drive with this laptop, didn’t come with it, didn’t spend the extra $100 bucks for it.
So this leaves me with the point of this entry. There is a great web site Bart’s CD-Rom Boot Disk where you can download the software necessary to burn a boot disk. There are plenty of images that do different things. Once I burned a boot disk I booted the system from the cdrom and ran my trusty fdisk /mbr.