Rstore HP Omnibook XE2 back to Windows 2000 Pro

[Dapper Dan 0]

I just installed Suse 9.1 Professional on this laptop, only to discover there is a huge 2 inch black margin around the desktop image. I have found out there is no fix for this, and the makers of the screen will not support Linux.

 

If the person I'm doing this for decides against having a postage stamp version of Suse, how can I restore it to its original Windows only state?

 

I can eliminate the Linux partitions, and resize Windows back to cover the entire disk, but I'm uncertain as to how to wipe out grub from the MBR and have it boot to Windows only. Ant help will be greatly appreciated. Thanks.

 

 

[danleff 0]

I remember this from an old Suse install on a laptop I did several years ago. There was an option in xfconfig, as you set up the screen options to "stretch" the screen to fit. This fixed the problem for me. However, I don't know if it still is an option in the much newer version.

 

If he/she is lucky enough to have the Win 2000 install cd, I have done this;

 

Boot Win2K using the recovery cd, go into Recover, then select Command mode.

 

When prompted, log on as Administrator. Execute the fixboot and fixmbr commands.

 

You should now boot Win2K again as usual.

 

If he/she only has the HP recovery cd's, I'm not quite sure how to do this.

[Dapper Dan 0]

I've not found a similar utility. Maybe there's still hope I can fix this. Any other ideas?

[danleff 0]

How mission critical is the win install on this system?

 

If you don't have a win 2000 or win xp install cd in order to get into the recovery console to do fixmbr and fixboot, you may be able to use a win 95 or win 98 boot disk to fix the mbr. The problem is that some have reported that this does not work on some systems.

 

So, if all else fails, try going to bootdisk.com and grab a win 95 boot disk. Once booted to the command line, type in fdisk /mbr

 

Again, this is chancy, but works most of the time.

 

What concerns me, is that this is an HP system. If it has a hidden recovery partition, hopefully this will not touch that.