How To Uninstall Linux And Remove GRUB July 16th, 2010
I’ve recently been using one of my machines in a dual-boot configuration running Windows 7 Ultimate alongside the latest Ubuntu LTS distribution, although decided that I wanted to revert it back into a dedicated Windows machine and ‘reclaim’ the disk space being utilised by Linux.
Of course there are a few ways of doing this; I’d normally only run a dual boot configuration on a test machine so wouldn’t be too perturbed by having to rebuild and start over, but this machine already had a lot of data and customisation and I didn’t want to start again and rebuild from the OS up. So how else do you set about removing Linux and GRUB? Well, the answer is actually quite simple.
Caveat: I cannot stress the importance of ensuring you have a full backup of all the data on the machine before proceeding. If you don’t have one, stop now.
Before going any further, you’ll need to dig out your original Windows 7 installation media as you’ll need this in the following steps, then once you are ready do the following:
- Restart your machine and enter the BIOS
- Somewhere in the BIOS menu you’ll find a setting to change the boot order of your machine, enter this and ensure that you have the DVD drive set at the top of the boot order
- Enter your Windows 7 DVD into the drive and restart
- Press any key on your keyboard when prompted to enter setup
- Select the appropriate language, time, currency and keyboard layout and click Next
- Click Repair your computer
- Click the option highlighting the operating system that you want to repair, in my case Windows 7 and then click Next
- On the following screen, System Recovery Options, click Command Prompt
- Once the command prompt opens on your screen type the following followed by Enter:
Bootrec.exe /FixMbr - You should now see ‘operation completed successfully’
- Restart your machine and enter the BIOS once again to change the boot order back to its original setting
- Now, restart your machine and you should notice that GRUB has been replaced with the stock windows boot loader and Windows starts to load without prompt
- Once back in the GUI, right click My Computer followed by Manage and Disk Management
- Right click the Linux partitions and remove them (simplified, you will have to click a few buttons here to acknowledge the steps)
- Right click the Windows partition and extend it into the space created by removing the Linux partitions (again simplified, just acknowledge the prompts as they appear)
- Job done
You should now find that GRUB and Linux are no more and you have a dedicated Windows machine once again, the whole process should take no more than around 5 minutes; far preferable to the hours it would have taken to rebuild the machine from scratch.
Note: the same method also applies for other distributions of Linux
Tags: bootloader, GRUB, linux, ubuntu
This entry was posted on Friday, July 16th, 2010 at 6:19 pm and is filed under Blah, Linux, Linux Mint, Microsoft, Technology Related, Ubuntu, Windows 7. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
