Oh, a partition table killer
The last time I tried to remove Linux in favour of Windows (shock, horror) was about 3 years ago. The answer I found at the time was that MS fdisk doesn't understand Linux partitions, but Linux fdisk does.
So the trick was to get a Linux boot disc that was set up to detect the hard drive and any partitions on it (thankfully Red Hat, which is what I was removing, provided this as standard. The images are on their install CDs) and use Linux fdisk to completely remove the Linux partitions. The MS version could then understand what was going on and modify partitions as normal.
I understand that this is still largely the same. Some Windoze programs like PartitionMagic claim to be able to modify Linux partitions - which they can provided you're using only the standard ext2, ext3 and swap partition types. For setups like my own (reiserfs) it still needs Linux to do it.
Anyway, once you've booted from your floppy disc and got a linux console (command prompt) do this to see what partitions you have:
assuming you're talking about the first hard disc. The naming convention is hda is the primary master, hdb is the primary slave, hdc is the secondary master and hdd is the secondary slave.
This brings up the fdisk environment
Code:
Command (m for help):
Type "p" to print the partition table (tells you what partitions are where, and what type they are)
Code:
Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/hda1 * 1 184 370912+ 83 VFAT
/dev/hda2 185 368 370944 83 Linux
/dev/hda3 369 552 370944 83 Linux
/dev/hda4 553 621 139104 82 Linux swap
Then you want to delete each of the partitions hda2 to hda4. Unlike MS fdisk, changes are not instant.
Type d to delete a partition. It looks like this:
Code:
Command (m for help): d
Partition number (1-4): 2
Finally write all your changes to disc.
Code:
Command (m for help): w
fdisk will automatically exit.
Reboot into MS and see what its fdisk will let you do.