I have windows xp on a 120 gig drive and linux mandrake 9.0 on a 15 gig drive. I want to remove the 15 gig drive because it is really loud. Does anyone know how I can get rid of the boot loader without losing all my data. I tried to just disconnect the 15 gig drive and when the computer boots I get

01010101010101010101010101010
01010101010101010101010101010
01010101010101010101010101010
01010101010101010101010101010

The only way I know is to do fdisk mbr but if I do that I would loose all the data on the drive right ?

Nope. ``fdisk /mbr'' should just copy the original boot record over the boot loader you have now. It won't affect the data on any of the partitions or the definitions of the partitions.

As I understand it, 'fdisk /mbr' only wipes the master boot region's bootloader code, and nothing else.

http://www.claws-and-paws.com/virus/articles/fdisk.shtml

If I understand correctly - You've Got a 120GB primary disk and a 15GB slave. XP is installed on the Primary and Linux is on the slave? I'm assuming that you let Linux load Lilo or Grub as the bootloader is this true?

If that's the case then fdisk /mbr would simply replace the MBR on the primary with a generic entry. Looks like a pointer to LILO/GRUB is in there now. I Don't think XP tries to be "cute" with the placement of the partition table so it would leave your data intact. I've used it in the past to remove LILO without issue.

If it turns out that you can't boot just copy: BOOT.INI, NTLDR, and NTDETECT.COM to a floppy prior to running fdisk. You can boot it off the floppy and repair then.

Thanks for the replies I wasn't sure if fdisk mbr would screw up everything. I actually used fixmbr from the xp recovery console and that worked without destroying anything.

Thanks again I'm getting closer to a silent system.

I ran the maxtor amset utility on the 120 gig and it is silent now. It was a pain to have to connect a floppy to run it though.