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Possible Duplicate:
How to remove Ubuntu and put Windows back on?

I have an Acer Netbook with Windows XP on it.
I had installed Ubuntu 12.04 (actually upgraded from 10.?? to 11.04 to 11.10 and on to 12.04) I want to remove Ubuntu 12.04 and try some other previous version or kubuntu or lubuntu because I am finding 12.04 slow and the read/writes to USB devices (whether flash or ext HDD) terribly slow. I just can't use it this way.

I found a bunch of info on how to remove Ubuntu safely. But that involved installing EasyBCD and when I installed it, it told me that it cannot find the BCD registry and that it would work only on Vista and Windows 7.

In my understanding, uninstalling/removing Ubuntu safely involves 2 or 3 steps. 1. Fix mbr 2. delete the linux partition 3. Expand the windows partition to use the unallocated disk space (got from deleting the linux partition).

In order to fix the mbr, I used the following commmand that I found here.

sudo lilo -M /dev/sda mbr

I created a bootable USB stick with 11.04 and booted the netbook with it and then did the above command.

After that rebooted the PC, chose to boot Windows (from the Windows multiboot menu - the GRUB menu was gone as a result of the above lilo command I assume).

Then I did diskmgmt.msc and deleted the linux partition (sda3). But I was not able to resize the windows partition (sda2) since Windows XP does not have that option. I tried using gparted to do the resizing as mentioned here, but that somehow did not work. That is - the sda2 showed up as 87.72 GB and it did not allow me to increase the size to include the 47.23 GB space that is unallocated as a result of deleting the linux partition.

Now, when I boot, it still shows me 'Ubuntu' in the windows multiboot menu. Is there a way I can get rid of it so that it only shows Windows?

I am going to install 11.04, but I would still be able to resize the unallocated space so that I could try another version as well which allows me to use USB HDD at a decent speed.

Thanks

Community
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user82171
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1 Answers1

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You do not need to remove an old install of Ubuntu before installing anther distro, you also don't need to re-install Windows bootloader and definitely you don't need to resize Windows partition to take up the space previously occupied by Ubuntu.

Just boot from Kubuntu/Lubuntu LiveCD/USB, choose "Other" when it asks you whether you want to install instead of Windows or alongside Windows and manually choose the partition(s) previously used by the previous Ubuntu install.

Make sure you're ticked "Format partition", which will re-format the partition, removing all the data from it.

Sergey
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