Removing Linux.

[linkspast]

I want ubuntu removed. and my drive un-partitioned. how?

[Smoke]

Fairly simple:

Boot from your Windows XP installation disk, select option R when presented with the options to start installation, start the recovery console or quit setup.

You'll find yourself in the recovery console. Log on to your XP installation(Admin password required) and type "fixmbr" without the quotes.

Follow the onscreen instructions and reboot from your harddisk(Type exit, remove CD, let your system boot)

GRUB should be uninstalled now, and you'll end up going straight to Windows XP.

Once in XP, go to Control Panel > Administrative Tools > Computer Management. Go to Disk Management in here.

You'll see the partitions on your harddisk(s). Some of them will be labeled with an Unknown filesystem. Right-click and Delete these partitions(You'll find at least two)

You'll be left with some available space, which can be turned into a new formatted partition. See note 5 for more details.

Once the partition is made and formatted(as NTFS, since FAT32 sucks), your Ubuntu installation will be gone.

Some things to note:

1) Since you are deleting the partitions, all data on them will be removed. Make backups of everything you wish to keep.

2) Some computer manufacturers include a hidden recovery partition, which tends to be marked as Unknown too. Make sure you don't delete this.

3) Follow these steps as described. Do NOT delete the partitions first, because you'll fuck up GRUB that way and won't be able to boot into XP.

4) If you don't have an XP installation disk, there's not much you can do, except for getting one. Note that you don't need the one that came with the system, any bootable Windows XP installation disk will do.

5) You cannot merge partitions with XP itself, you'll need a third-party tool like PartitionMagic for this. PartitionMagic is actually a better option to manage the partitions with, since it can detect filesystems XP doesn't know(or care about) and is able to merge partitions, as well as perform various conversions between filesystems.

As a side note: Your drive is always partitioned, even if you have only one partition .

[sonicbhoc]

Ubuntu sucks. Even if you switch back to Windows I recommend that you try a pclinuxos liveCD after you do. It's got beryl and support for almost every media format out-of-the-box and I run it on all of my computers... aside from this one, which runs Gentoo Linux because I like having full control over every single piece of my computer and tailoring it to sqeeze out the most performance for the least hard drive consumption.

Oh yeah, realtime kernels are great for audio production, even this cruddy computer doesn't get xruns and skips in the audio with one.

[atmuh]

what if I don't have an XP installation disc?

[sonicbhoc]

you're screwed.

EDIT: Do you already have Windows installed? Because if you do, you could just use PCLinuxOS to repartition the drive instead of a Windows disk. Although using Linux to get rid of Linux is probably some form of heresy or something. ;P

[Smoke]

aside from this one, which runs Gentoo Linux because I like having full control over every single piece of my computer and tailoring it to sqeeze out the most performance for the least hard drive consumption.

Ah, good old Gentoo ricer talk .

[sonicbhoc]

Ah, good old Gentoo ricer talk .

you bet. I even added -omg-optimized at the end of my kernel version.

I also have 2 kernels, a realtime kernel and a regular one. Why? Because I got bored one day and decided to compile a realtime kernel.

But the real reason I like to use Gentoo is the fact that I can micromanage every part of my system. I still haven't found a good binary distro that I can do that with.

Gentoo doesn't move much faster than a binary distro, but with limited hard drive space it makes it easy to get rid of extra dependencies that I don't need... like ldap or portaudio or half of Gnome... with the use flag system.

Gentoo is a great learning experience, and the main reason I use it is to learn different ways to break and fix my system to see what works better.

I also like portage. No dependency problems. I just wish it was faster though.

My main problem with it is that compile times suck on this computer. Ugh.