How do I uninstall Grub4DOS?

[Relztrah]

I am installing Precise Puppy on an old HP laptop. I went through the steps of installing Puppy to the hard drive in hopes that I could boot without the Live CD in the optical drive. When I did so, I received that Invalid Partition Table error message.

Thinking I could somehow fix this with Grub4DOS, I activated it. Now I get the option to boot to Windows or Advanced Menu (see attachment pl1).

There is no Windows on this laptop so I select Advanced Menu and get what you see on attachment pl3. Unfortunately none of these options boots to Puppy, including Unknown (sda7:PBS) which is my hard drive. When I select Unknown (sda7:PBS) I get what you see in pl2.

So I would like to uninstall Grub4DOS to start, and then work on eliminating the Invalid Partition Table error message that I receive when attempting to boot to Puppy without the CD in the optical drive.

Thanks in advance for any help. I'm still very much a novice, so if you offer a solution, please provide simple step-by-step instructions.

[foxpup]

My guess here is you did something wrong in your frugal install.

Where have you installed it? You seem to have at least 7 partitions on your hd.
How did you install it?

Did you run grub4dos and let it search for the new Puppy install?
It did not find one, which is unusual if there is one. Grub4dos is very good for Puppy.

[foxpup]

Thanks in advance for any help. I'm still very much a novice, so if you offer a solution, please provide simple step-by-step instructions.

This is taken from another thread (Grub wont Install) hoping it can help:

Maybe you don't know how to?
I wil try to describe a procedure for frugal install on your hd.

This is for machines with legacy BIOS and msdos table.
(EFI with gpt hd is a bit different.)

Suppose you have a Puppy running from USB/CD.

1. Choose or make the partition for the frugal install. The partition does not have to be empty.
If you will make it, choose ext3 (or ext4) unless you have a good reason not to.
You can use gparted from the menu.

2. Choose or make the partition to boot from. This is mostly the same as 1.
Set the boot flag on it; you can use gparted.

3. Go to the partition in 1 (click on the drive icon on your desktop) and make a new directory, let's say Xenialpup.
Open the directory.
Go to your USB (click on the drive icons on your desktop) and copy initrd.gz, vmlinuz and all .sfs files you find to the directory Xenialpup you just made.
Better than going to the usb is, to mount the .iso and copy initrd.gz, vmlinuz and all .sfs from there to the Xenialpup directory.

You have made the frugal install! You've just copied (or drag and copy) some files.
Now you have to have something to boot with.
You can use grub4dos.

4. Grub4dos is in every Puppy. You run it from the menu after you have done a frugal install (1-3).
Let it install mbr the first time you run it.
Let it put grldr and menu.lst on the partition you flagged in 3
Let it make a new menu.lst
Grub4dos will search for windows and Puppy and others that are bootable and create an entry in menu.lst.
This entries are mostly fine for windows and frugal Puppy. Sometimes they need twitching. You can do that anytime. Don't do it now.

Shut down.
Remove USB.
Boot.
You should get the grub4dos menu and have the choice to boot your frugal Puppy.

[Relztrah]

My guess here is you did something wrong in your frugal install.

Where have you installed it? You seem to have at least 7 partitions on your hd.
How did you install it?

Did you run grub4dos and let it search for the new Puppy install?
It did not find one, which is unusual if there is one. Grub4dos is very good for Puppy.

Thank you for your prompt reply.

Since I don't intend to dual boot and Windows is no longer on this machine, I did a full install. Should I re-install as frugal?

There are not 7 partitions, but I have used Gparted so many times that new partitions are created and I'm up to number 7. I installed Puppy using the universal installer from the desktop shortcut. I'll attach a screenshot of its contents if that's helpful.

I'm not sure what you mean by letting Grub4DOS "search" for the new Puppy install. I was never given that option when activating Grub4DOS.

Thank you again for your help. I'll follow the instructions on the follow-up post when I get the time.

[foxpup]

Is this sda7?
It does not have a Puppy installed, not full, and not frugal.
But the precisesave.2fs suggests a frugal install.
For a frugal install you should have vmlinuz, initrd.gz and at least one .sfs file there, or in a directory.
Is there another partition where the installation could be?
If not, you could try this:
Copy vmlinuz, initrd.gz and puppy_precise_xxx.sfs file(s) from the .iso or from the CD to /sda7.
Look with gparted if /sda7 has the boot flag. (BTW what filesystem is sda7?)
Then run grub4dos:
. choose the right device (sda),
. tick "Do not rewrite existing boot record" (sda_mbr.BAK is the old boot record (from windows?) and suggests grub4dos already installed its boot record)
. untick "Do not rewrite menu.lst" (this makes grub4dos search)
and continu.
Then reboot.

This is then a frugal install.
However, how big is your RAM? If this install would run to slow or clog up your machine, it would be better to do a full install.

Another consideration. Precise is not so recent a Puppy.
Have you considered a more recent (ubuntu) Puppy, maybe Tahr, or do you have a particular reason to use precise?

[mikeslr]

...

Since I don't intend to dual boot and Windows is no longer on this machine, I did a full install. Should I re-install as frugal?

There are not 7 partitions, but I have used Gparted so many times that new partitions are created and I'm up to number 7. I installed Puppy using the universal installer from the desktop shortcut.

Ditto what foxpup wrote. I'd suggest sailor enceladus's recent build of Slacko 5.7, to wit 5.7.1_r6231 for older computers. You can obtain it here: https://www.mediafire.com/folder/kwhxksubf00ny/14.0. Slacko 5.7 was published about the same time as Precise. Newer Puppies make higher demands on computer resources, RAM and CPU. Sailor's re-creation of Slacko updates applications and components without significantly increasing those demands.

There's a possibility that your partition table is screwed up. If you don't have anything worth saving on this computer, I'd start from scratch. If you do have anything worth saving, attach a photo of what gparted sees.

You didn't mention what medium you used to install Precise to the hard-drive. But as you used the Universal Installer, you apparently had Precise running from a USB-Key or CD. The important take-away from that being that you can boot your computer from OTHER-THAN the hard-drive. Do it again.

Open Menu>System>Gparted and select your Hard-drive for its examination and manipulation. On Gparted's Menu at the top of the screen select Device>Create Partition Table. After OK'ing the warning and following the instructions (clicking Apply? -- I'm working from memory as I don't want to wipe out anything) you'll end up with a hard-drive entirely unallocated. Select that, and choose either Ext3 or Ext4 as its format type. Remember to set Manage Flags to make it bootable.

I never use the Universal Installer and always do Frugal installs. Close gparted after it has completed creating a new partition table and formatted hard-drive. Your desktop will then show a desktop drive icon providing access to that newly structured hard-drive/partition. Left-Click it to open a window to it. Also Left-click the desktop-drive icon for you USB-Stick or CD/DVD. On the latter you'll see files with the following names: initrd.gz, puppy_precise_SOME-NUMBER.sfs, vmlinuz and maybe zdrv_precise_SOME-NUMBER.sfs. Copy these from your CD/USB-Stick to the window to your hard-drive. [As foxpup noted, in order to function a Puppy must have all those file, although in some older Puppies the Dev did not include a zdrv.sfs, having located its contents in the puppy_xxx.sfs].

Note the name Puppy gave to the hard-drive/partition. Probably something like sda1. Grub4dos will identify it by the same name but without any partition number; e.g. sda. Left-Click it again to unmount it. Grub4dos can not write mounted partitions. Now run Menu>System>Grub4dos. Select the hard-drive device with the hard-drive's label as the location to which grub4dos should be installed, and check the "Search only within this device" box. When it's finished you should be good to go.

[Colonel Panic]

"Ditto what foxpup wrote. I'd suggest sailor enceladus's recent build of Slacko 5.7, to wit 5.7.1_r6231 for older computers. You can obtain it here: https://www.mediafire.com/folder/kwhxksubf00ny/14.0. Slacko 5.7 was published about the same time as Precise. Newer Puppies make higher demands on computer resources, RAM and CPU. Sailor's re-creation of Slacko updates applications and components without significantly increasing those demands. "

Thanks! I've just downloaded it.

[Relztrah]

I will experiment with these options and report back later. Thanks again.