Removing a dual boot

I am sorry to say I will be taking linux mint 8 off my eee pc, I love linux a great deal. It's a really nice OS. For me it topped windows in everyway except for 1 (The most important one for the netbook) battery. I was getting 7-8 solid hours of battery in windows xp and only 4-5 in linux mint 8. I tried a variety of things and nothing seemed to work so I eventually moved back to windows, however now I have a 75 gig extended partition with linux mint 8 and the swap partition inside it. I would like to format this partition back to ntfs so I can use it with windows again. How do I do this?

 

Boot into a XP install disc, go to Repair and type "fixmbr". Then boot into XP and format the linux partition.

 

see theirs the main issue, the netbook doesn't have a recovery drive.....there is some sort of recovery partition on my hd but I'm not to sure what to do.

also I can't find the linux mint 8 partition in windows as its filesystem is ext4

 

It should show up as 'other' partition type if you go to start->run (or winkey+R) and type diskmgmt.msc. Then you should be able to right click on it and format it. If that doesn't work you can of course use gparted from a liveCD or liveusb to delete that partition. Then go into windows again and it should allow you to format it as NTFS. Be careful not to use that recovery partition because that will wipe out your existing installation.

 

I think I'm going to end up using gparted as I am familiar with that, How do I reset the MBR though to only start up with windows XP? I can't use the fixmbr in the install cd because I don't have a cd drive in the netbook

 

sorry but will removing the partition with gparted remove the boot thing to so it will go right to windows xp everytime?

 

No the mbr isn't part of a partition. You can use supergrub on a usb stick to remove grub. To make a bootable supergrub usb drive use unetbootin

http://www.supergrubdisk.org/index.php?pid=7

http://www.supergrubdisk.org/w/index.php5/UninstallGRUB