Firstly, please forgive me if this is not the correct forum for this but I am desperate now and have not been able to find a forum that explains this process in a way that i understand clearly.Let me start by saying I like Suse 11.1 really i do. I love the stability it has some good features but regrettably on a day to day basis I just cant live with her anymore.The love affair is over.Living with suse is a little like being married to the devils daughter and living with the in-laws, its far too complicated.So it is with heavy heart that I wish to COMPLETELY remove Suse 11.1 and return to Windows XP pro. Maybe one day when Suse becomes easier to live with I may return,i still have some fond memories.
Some information that may help.
I have a Toshiba Satellite pro 120GB HD Dual
core processor.My entire drive has been given to Suse, I have NO OTHER OPERATING SYSTEM installed.I have the Toshiba recovery CD. I am running the Gnome desktop.
I have tried reinstalling XP using the recovery Cd when i do i get a black screen with a white progress bar saying “Loading DRAM Please wait” it then freezes,i cant use the mouse or the keyboard i get the same result when booting to the recovery console. can someone please tell me as SIMPLY as is humanly possible what i need to do to completely remove suse and reinstall Windows XP. I am not interested in installing Wine or anything else like that I just want XP back. If it helps i believe it has something to do with the “Master Boot Record” but have no idea what this means.And i don’t want to.If someone can help I will be very grateful.For the record I believe Suse will one day be a great desktop operating system, but it is NOT today or tomorrow, but one day soon:|
Boot a liveCD such as gparted, or parted magic … or sidux (and in sidux go to gparted program) and simply reformat the drive.
Then install winXP.
Actually, I’m a bit surprised winXP won’t install now over openSUSE. Its quite possible this is a winXP install problem, and not the fault of openSUSE, and if that is the case, then the problem needs to be addressed by a Windows forum.
The problem you’ve got is that Windows CDs are terrible at recognizing and dealing with linux partitions.
I’ve even seen people advising that once you’ve installed linux on a hard drive, you may as well throw it away, because you can’t get rid of it. Fortunately, these people are idiots.
The trick is to ‘fight linux with linux’. You want to use a linux live CD - any will do, although if you don’t have one I’ve heard that gparted live is quite good for this sort of thing.
If you’re uncomfortable using something unknown, maybe use a suse live CD - at least you know that runs on your hardware, and people on this forum will be able to guide you on using it.
Load up your live CD, and delete the partitions on the drive you want to install windows on, and leave it unpartitioned.
That should allow you to install Windows fine.
And if you ever do come back, try posting requests for help. Mostly people don’t bite.
A good Linux install will only change the active partition pointer in the MBR, but sometimes grub (linux boot manager) is put on the MBR. When the Linux grub boot manager is put on the MBR, and when one wishes to remove Linux completely, its necessary to remove grub from the MBR and replace it with MBR code from microsoft. Typically one’s recovery CD will do that.
There are also commercial boot CDs for Windows that will do that, and some Utility (possibly free) boot CDs for Windows that will do that. One can remove grub from the MBR with the Linux live CD supergrub disk.
Just a note, wouldn’t it be a good idea to restore MBR from the backup located in /boot/ (only IF openSUSE didn’t kill the recovery partition) and then restore?
