Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Filed under: Linux Mantras, Troubleshooting Leave a comment April 20, 2012
Linux is a great operating system and more often than not, its the installation of Linux that is the matter of discussion. For a change, I will be talking about how touninstall Linux Ubuntu (or other operating systems) from a dual boot windows pc, and still being able to boot into other OS without much work. So lets get started right away.
Log in to an account with administrative privileges. Right click on My Computer, click Manage. Choose Disk Management listed under Storage and you will see all of your partitions listed there.
Next, you need to identify Linux partitions. The Linux partitions generally dont have a file system listed with them if Windows doesnt recognize it, so this can serve as a clue. Other ways can be identifying by size or partition number. You can use partition managers, these are generally better at identifying filesystems. Go ahead, delete the partitions, just make sure you delete the correct ones. Linux is gone and so is GRUB, which allowed you to choose operating system to use at boot time. So currently, you cannot boot into any other operating system, without some help. We are going to fix that soon.
Restore MBR
As we noted, GRUB is gone and so is the ability to boot into Windows. You would now need to boot from the Windows CD/DVD to restore the Master Boot Record. You can also use other Live CDs like
one of my absolute favorites and highly recommended HBCD just in case you dont have Windows installation media handy. Here are the steps: Boot from Windows CD/DVD and choose Repair when it shows up.
Choose command prompt on the resulting screen and run the following two commands: bootrec /fixmbr bootrec /fixboot XP users need to run the recovery console from Windows XP CD and then type fixmbr when at the command prompt.